Here are three cases of very, very brave people and their very frightening experiences (for those who see it from the outside).
It’s rare, very rare, but there are people who literally don’t feel afraid.
Fear is a primordial emotion, sculpted by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It activates the “fight or flight” mechanism, accelerates the heart, constricts blood vessels and releases adrenaline. to prepare us to face danger or escape from it.
At the center of this system is the amygdalaa small structure in the brain that, together with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, evaluates threats and decides whether we should freeze, run or fight.
When this circuit is damaged, by genetic disease, tumors or complex surgery, the result can be as fascinating as it is dangerous: a life virtually without fear.
What makes some people afraid?
Jordy Cernik He is one of the few people who looks at death like someone at the breakfast table. The Brit knew he was different when he went skydiving in 2013: he didn’t feel any adrenaline, says .
Since he discovered that he was naturally braver than the average mortal, he began doing all kinds of high-risk stunts: he has already roped down the 128 meters of the National Lift Tower, in Northampton, without any acceleration of his heartbeat.
In 2005, Cernik had already been diagnosed with Cushing’s syndromea rare disease caused, in most cases, by a tumor in the pituitary gland that overproduces the hormone ACTH, which causes the body to manufacture too much cortisol.
The body reacts as if it were under constant threat: weight gain, intense sweating, exhaustion. In Cernik’s case, doctors ended up removing the pituitary gland and, later, the adrenal glands, to nip the problem in the bud.
That’s when everything changed. Without adrenals, the body stopped producing adrenaline. Tests carried out by scientists while facing extreme heights showed virtually zero physiological response to what, for most people, would be a panic situation.
Cernik describes the feeling as if “a switch in the brain” had been turned off.
At the same time, the absence of adrenaline makes small pains more intense and leaves you almost unable to feel strong emotions or enthusiasm, which makes day-to-day life unmotivating, reveals the Brit.
The good news is that Cernik is not alone. Another case that entered the scientific literature is that of SM, a North American woman with an ultra-rare genetic disease, the Urbach-Wiethe disease. Calcium deposits progressively destroyed both cerebral amygdalae. Only around 400 people have ever been diagnosed with this pathology, but the case of SM is unique in its impact on fear.
Researchers at the University of Iowa subjected her to a real scary situations marathon: contact with snakes and spiders, visit to one of the most famous haunted houses in the world, the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, and sessions with horror films such as The Shining or Silence of the Lambs. In all experiments, the same conclusion: no fear reaction.
In real life, the absence of fear did not make her avoid dangerous situations. Unfortunately, she was a victim of domestic violence, death threats and even had a knife held to her neck by a stranger in a park. Instead of panicking, he responded calmly and walked away — but returned to the same park the next day. When remembering these episodes, he says he never felt fear per se, but rather sadness and anger.
Jody Smith also saw her fear practically disappear after radical surgery to treat severe epilepsy, which involved removing parts of the amygdala, temporal lobe and hippocampus. Before the operation, he suffered intense panic attacks, associated with family trauma. Two weeks later, the seizures disappeared and, over time, Smith realized that he no longer had the typical “fight or flight” response.
He describes his new relationship with risk as “nuanced”: you know intellectually that something is dangerous, you don’t want to fall off a cliff or be robbed, but your body doesn’t react with fear. As a mountain hiker, he began approaching cliffs to test his instincts. In one episode in Newark, he calmly walked past a group of men who seemed about to rob him. The unexpected serenity disarmed the group, which let him continue.
These extreme cases raise important questions about the role of fear. In a modern world where we no longer run from predators, many of our fear responses have become maladaptive. Phobias, panic attacks, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive or post-traumatic stress disorders are, to a large extent, the result of an overactive alert system.
Studying people like these can help us better understand how to modulate this system, not to turn off fear, because that would be dangerous, but to keep it at healthy levels.
Science is beginning to decipher how specific circuits in the brain amplify or silence fear, opening the door to new treatments.
