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Chapter 1: Who is the woman who feels no fear?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we are opening up a case file. This is where we report on case reports, which are curious stories from the scientific nerd literature.
Basically an N of 1, a patient wears something weird as...
Chapter 2: What role does the amygdala play in fear?
happened to them to go on this adventure.
We have science journalist and friend of the show, Joel Werner. Hello.
Hello. I'm a curious nerd. This is perfect.
Chapter 3: What experiments did scientists conduct to test her fear response?
Let's go.
All right, Joel, to kick us off today, can you tell me about a time that you felt afraid, very afraid?
Chapter 4: How did the woman react to being scared with snakes?
Look, it's a long list. My fear runs deep.
Really?
Are you afraid, you can?
Chapter 5: What happened when she faced a haunted house?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the last time I felt truly afraid was when I found out how many people listen to podcasts at double speed.
Oh.
Chapter 6: What are the potential risks of feeling no fear?
What's wrong with you people? This is supposed to be a fun thing. You're supposed to relax. Don't rush through it. No, but seriously, growing up in Australia, I spent a lot of time in the ocean as a kid. And it's really easy for the ocean to go from being like an idyllic, beautiful day to to being a near-death experience.
And, like, I have this one memory of being at a surf beach, and I had gone to the beach with some friends, and we'd sort of swum out beyond the first breakers, like the shore break, where the first waves crash, and we're catching some waves, you know, frolicking in the water. It's like a soda commercial, you know. Yes.
And then, yeah, suddenly get dumped by a wave, get thrown around underwater, stick my head up, take in a breath, and as I come up, there's another wave crashing on me straight away. And so it happens again. And then I think when the waves hit in a particular frequency, then you suddenly just like your every gasp of air is a little bit shallower than the last one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you start panicking a little bit.
Chapter 7: How does carbon dioxide affect fear responses?
Is that what you were doing? Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was – it went from feeling like – you know, oh, I've been thrown around for one or two waves to being like, if this keeps going, if I don't get out of this, then there's a good chance that something bad could happen.
So what did you do? How did you get out?
Well, I ended up being able to swim with the waves. So I kind of caught a wave through to that shore break area. And then once you can stand, you can kind of like stand up and battle the surf with your legs as well. But I think it's that feeling when you're just floating in the ocean and getting pummeled by the waves. It's, yeah, it's pretty intimidating.
Well, today on the show, we're telling you about someone who would be in that situation and their heart might not even skip a beat.
Hmm.
They wouldn't be scared at all.
Wow. Someone who has nerves of steel. Like not the fraidy cat that I am, I guess.
Someone the complete opposite of you. And it's all coming up after the break. Welcome back today on the show. We're bringing you a case file, strange reports, case reports from the literature.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions can we draw about fear from this woman's experiences?
And we're here with Joel Werner.
Hello, hello.
Hello. All right, we're going to jump right in. This is a story about a woman who we're going to call SM. And years ago, she started getting these strange spells where she would smell a funny odor and it was followed by this sensation of being detached or feeling like she was watching herself from above. And so she gets a referral to the University of Iowa for a checkup, see what's going on.
She heads there and in a paper about SM and kind of this moment, really, doctors describe her as pleasant and cheerful, but also quick to become friendly with examiners and experimenters. Which is exactly how Dr. Justin Feinstein, who worked at the University of Iowa, describes her.
She's extremely friendly. She's very trusting. She starts speaking to you right away as if you have this long history, as if she's already your friend. The next thing you know, she's asking personal details about your life and she's telling you very personal details about her life.
So she's a bit too much. We all know people like this though. This isn't, you know, we don't need to study people who are just like don't know boundaries, don't understand social boundaries, right?
But there's some other reasons we might want to study SM, right? So doctors start running tests to see what's going on with these spells. And they give her a CT scan, which uses a kind of x-ray on your brain. And normally with a CT scan, you just want to see a lot of gray brain.
That's how, you know, you don't want to see like white patches in there suggesting there's some bone somewhere in your brain. But here's what they saw when they looked at SM's brain.
It's quite exquisite. What they saw was very much unprecedented at the time. It was these two bean-shaped patterns. Hyper-intense bright white patterns.
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