Ever known someone who was totally fearless?
Justin Feinstein, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa, studied a woman who never felt fear.
This woman had Urbach-Wiethe disease, a condition that causes the amygdala to calcify – it hardens and shrivels up.
Now, we know that the amygdala is responsible for processing stimuli related to fear, so without an amygdala, this woman should have been fearless.
Feinstein and his research team wanted to test this hypothesis. Along with the aforementioned woman, they found two more patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease, plus 12 healthy subjects to serve as controls.
Using a mask, they administered a 35% mixture of carbon dioxide to all the subjects.
Normally, the amygdala detects high concentrations of carbon dioxide as a sign of possible suffocation, and triggers a fear response.
Yet the Urbach-Wiethe patients actually reported significantly more fear and panic than the controls. Indeed, in interviews conducted after the tests, the patients all used the word “panic” – and said the experience was like nothing they’d felt before.
So what does this mean?
Well, we know that the amygdala plays an important role in regulating the fear response, but the patients without them felt fear anyway.
So perhaps the amygdala isn’t the only part of the brain responsible for fear – maybe it’s not even required to feel fear.
And because the patients without a working amygdala had panic attacks, it’s possible that some other part of the brain is responsible for feelings of panic.
But perhaps most importantly, this study challenges an existing assumption about how the brain works. We need to be prepared for research like this to come out and challenge our previous perceptions about the brain.
Of course, this research is exploratory. Because Urbach-Wiethe disease is so rare, these researchers only found 3 patients to study. But this work is still important . . .
. . . and exciting.
With so much new research coming out, it can sometimes be a challenge to stay on top of it all. That’s one reason we put together the New Brain Science series.
We’ve found experts at the leading edges of their fields to gather the latest research and give you straightforward, practical summaries that you can use in your practice.
If you’d like to read more about the study, it was published online in Nature Neuroscience.
Have you ever worked with a patient who suffered from neurological damage? How did you changed your practice to work with them? Was it effective? Please share your experience in the comments below.
I don’t think thoughts hgave feelings-they create feeling, help us to express feelings. What do youthink?
I’d like to offer another incite into this conversation. When I have a seizure, most often it manifests as a complex partial seizure. This event plays out exactly the same each time it happens. It’s now occured literally hundreds of times over the course of twelve years. In those 10 minutes, I become a little girl. I giggle like a little girl and then become scared and confused saying things in a little girl’s voice like, “Where am I?” and “I’m scared.” Sometimes I cry. This behavior seemed ludicrous to me when it first began. It seemed the stuff of insanity and certainly doom me to a life inside an insane asylum. No doctor that I saw took up this pattern in an effort to understand my disease. They said it was “unrelated”. One night I had one of my nightmares. In it I was a little girl being attacked by my father, a common experience of my actual childhood. I woke inside a revelation. The little girl that showed herself inside my seizures was me! My little girl self who had been abused as a child had found a way to express herself. Was the abuse the only “cause” of the seizures. No, there were other contributing factors as well, but certainly abuse layed the foundations for chronic illness in my childhood. Look at the whole picture folks. It took me awhile to piece together an explanation of my illness, but I have a pretty good one now, not something any conventional, western doctor helped me find. They all claimed there was “no way of knowing anything about it.” This is something I explore in a book I just wrote about the experience called SEIZED.
Thanks so much for sharing
First, thank you so much for last nights lecture, it was fascinating, and thank you for all your series.
I was referred a patient, a young boy who was believed to have neurological damage and had been treated with many drugs for over 7 years, however no neurological basis could be discovered. He was about to take important exams but was missing huge amounts of schooling. Having recently trained in Somatic Experiencing [Peter Levine], which I am trying to integrate into my psycho-analytic practice, I used this method, ie going into the body as he was narrating his story. I uncovered 2 huge traumas in his life. The discharge of the trauma was incredible to watch; non stop yawning.
After 3 sessions he no longer suffered from the headaches and went onto to successfully take his exams.
I have also used this method with RTA patients. One was believed to suffer aggressive outbursts because of the brain damage from the accident. The SE uncovered previous trauma of DV which was not known to us, again allowing for a release, this time of anger towards her father. So even with organic damage it has been possible to affect the symptoms.
It is fascinating to continue learning about what the brain can do, the plasticity it has and strategies to restructure/reframe it. The one thing I haven’t heard or read in this series taken into account is the concept of cellular memory. When Dr. Doidge spoke about the study of tracking nerve pain (phantom limb pain) on a patient whereby touching the cheek elicited the pain, it appears the researcher was trying to determine the nerve pathway involved. Perhaps it was merely a locked in pain experience in cells on the face at the time of injury (i.e. grimacing at the time of injury). And in the explanation in the above post, it would be nice to know if the amygdala was damaged at birth or over time, which would have given the woman an opportunity to have had an experience and imprint of fear elsewhere in her brain or body. I am really enjoying the series and look forward to learning more. Thank you.
I have neurological damage myself. I have had extensive brain damage from head injury and strokes. Also I have worked with head injured and stroke survivors in my practice. My own damage changed my whole life and helped to set up a variety of new coping skills as I adapted and established rehabilitation myself. At 66 I am more functional and more capable than I was at 40! A research team at Callier Center at UTSW in Dallas were amazed at the comparison between the damage they saw on SPECT, BEAM, etc. findings compared to my functionality. They said my brain looked like a very elderly person with dementia just looking at the findings, yet my brain had developed new pathways to handle skills and abilities and functionally I was very near pre-trauma levels of functioning. Since I have lived the damage and the recovery, my position is that most people have the capability to recover most skills and I am very supportive of clients with this type of issue and help them to research resources, and share resources I have used. I approach the depression and anxiety that typically accompanies this type of injury primarily as grief related and help them develop a new way of viewing their journey to help reduce the ‘poor me’ and ‘ain’t it awful’ that can typically accompany loss of capabilities. It has defintely been a journey and my own testimony has help many people find hope and develop the willingness to make a determined effort to recover.
Sandra,
I am a stroke survivor and will celebrate my 8th anniversary this month. I continue to make improvement even now. What therapeutic means have you found to be most helpful?
Becke Voight
Sandra – the book I want to read is the one you write. Your comment is filled with wisdom and hope. I, too, want to know what you have found helpful for my clients as well as myself. Thank you.
Thanks Yaelah,
On the one hand it is wonderful that neuroscience continues to validate much of what mindfulness and other practices have known experientially, but the shadow side can be a reinforcement of head-centered, abstract and somewhat disembodied experience… i.e. the ‘self’ is hidden somewhere in the skull while ‘the body’ is somewhere ‘down there’ and the rest of the world is ‘out there’ (often experienced as ‘over-against’, hostile-threatening. Just as you say fear can and is experienced throughout the body, so too is joy, empathy, love and compassion, peace and release.
Thank you Yealah. As someone who has found her way to a healthy walk with epilepsy, your comments resonate with me. Once again, we watch as western “science” dissects and names “parts” claiming that by doing so it “understands” a problem. In fact, it creates more problems by continuing to use its machine metaphor to explain the entire natural world. Well, the natural world is NOT a machine!! Human beings are NOT a computer!! The whole cannot be understood by naming parts!! If we continue along this path pretty soon we’ll be cutting amygdalas out of people’s brains to save them the “trouble of fear”. Let’s remember that the amygdala wasn’t a part until we made it so by naming it. Those of us whose brains misfire on occassion will tell you that the problem is as much related to digestion and childhood trauma as it is to the tissue inside the area of the brain misfiring. In fact the tissue of the brain is probably quite healthy and responding to a confluence of other events inside the whole body/mind. Stop naming parts and calling it wisdom!
One of the common mistakes of conventional Western medicine is thet habit of discecting the body into seperate parts, attaching this or that function to each individual part, as if we are not talking about a whole unit (and by that I also mean body AND mind, not just body parts) with checks and balances. You cannot have a healthy liver without a healthy heart and you cannot have a healthy heart without healthy kidneys, just as an illustration. It simply does not work otherwise.
Fear is an expression of the mind within the body, so to put it all on the amygdala sounds unrealistic to begin with. Fear is felt in the heart, stomach, legs, bladder – everywhere. In Chinese medicine, it is attrubuted to the kidneys and even according to western medicine view, fear is felt initially in the adrenals which are responsible for secreting the stress hormones. So with all due importance to the amygdala – it is only one small part of the whole unit and only one of the many flesh expressions of the mind, that goes way and beyond the limits of the body.
I loved your response. I am not a scientist but I find these talks interesting and it helps me understand the Brain a bit better and how I approach my own “work”.
thank you.
Trish
What an elegant response and a wonderful reminder that we are much more than the sum of our parts. Although our current abilities to measure new aspects of the brain and its functioning can help to expand our understanding of some mind/body links, there is something deeper that makes us human and animates it all. Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters. I appreciate this series and the humanity of those presenting and those responding.