Spiders, clowns, snakes… There are some things in this world that we all fear to the point of getting goosebumps on the back of our neck. This fear is one of the strongest emotions that teaches us the “fight or flight” mechanism, and sometimes we survive only because of this impulse.

Well, have you ever thought that there can be a person who is not afraid of even a single thing in his life? There is a woman who finds snakes, spiders, even the insane asylum with the scariest stories just “interesting” to him; Patient with the pseudonym SM 046.

SM 046 can’t even feel the slightest emotion of fear

It is not possible to eradicate fears on your own, at least scientifically. If there is no problem in your brain that will cause the opposite, we always have room for many elements in life that will scare us from the moment we are born until we die.

However, the situation is not the same for the patient with the pseudonym SM 046. This woman, who has a hereditary disease called Urbach-Wiethe, which causes the amygdala region of the brain to disappear completely, can never feel that emotion called fear because she does not have the amygdala where our fear mechanism is located.

Life is normal for this woman in her 40s and has 3 children in the 1990s, except for the feeling of fear. He has an average IQ just like normal people, has a good memory, and has no impairments in either movement or thinking.

Everyone is scared except SM 046 at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which has been called the most cursed place in the world.

You know, you want to scare someone just to make a joke, but no matter what you do, you can’t reach your goal. This woman is at the top of that level. To give a strong example, SM 046 is taken to Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which is known as one of the most cursed places in the world and once operated as a hospital for the insane. If you remember, we previously featured this sanatorium in our article on the Scariest Places on Earth in our mysterious events series.

Extraordinary efforts are made to scare SM 046 in this sanatorium, which is now converted into a commercial-like place only to scare people on Halloween. Monsters that fit the stories of the sanatorium, people whose faces are made hideous with make-up appear in front of SM046 one by one, but the reaction of the woman is always the same; Laughing first and then trying to talk to monsters.

In fact, the situation progresses so much that SM 046 manages to scare the monster as it starts poking the head of a monster-looking person it approaches out of curiosity.

Although SM 046 does not know what fear is, it cannot make sense of the expressions of fear on people’s faces.

The brain of SM 046, which has attracted the attention of not only science but also everyone from all over the world, has been under investigation for many years. Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio and Daniel Tranel from the University of Iowa, who have been studying the meaning of fear for the amygdala and the brain in general for about 10 years with SM 046, conducted many experiments with the woman.

One of the experiments, which can be described as one of the first experiments with Sm 046, was carried out in 1994. In this experiment, SM 046 was confronted with a group of people and asked to rate the expressions of fear on the faces of the people in the group. SM 046 was very unsuccessful in this regard, because it did not have the slightest knowledge about fear, it was also a news about the expression on people’s faces when they were afraid.

SM 046, which is expected to be afraid of snakes, wanted to touch them with great interest.

Of course, the experiments with the SM 046 were not limited to the facial expression test. The mother of 3 children was taken to a pet shop with exotic animals such as snakes and spiders, and the degree of fear was calculated by examining her brain in interaction with each animal.

Stating that he hates snakes and spiders, SM 046 only showed signs of interest when he saw them, despite this claim. He even took the situation a step further and said, “Why, I wondered” for the snake, which is claimed to be extremely dangerous and should never be touched.

During the entire trip, the SM 046’s reactions to exotic animals were measured. Her level of fear never exceeded 2 out of 10 no matter what the young woman saw.

Researchers take things a step further and one night, suddenly, SM 046 has a knife to its throat.

Researchers, who have been experimenting with SM 046 for a long time, decide more than 10 years ago to push the boundaries a little and catch SM 046 by surprise while walking alone in the park one night.

One person selected for this experiment, SM 046, suddenly pounces on the woman while walking, and after holding a knife to her throat, tries to scare her by saying “I’m going to cut you now bitch”. SM 046, describing his experiences after the incident, said, “At that moment, I could hear the voices of the choir rising from the church in the distance. I didn’t feel anything and all I could say was ‘you have to cross the angels of God to kill me’.”

SM 046 is the only person in the world who has completely lost his sense of fear due to a problem with his amygdala

We said that the reason behind this feature of SM 046 is Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes the amygdala to disappear completely and some parts of the brain to harden.

Not all people suffering from this extremely rare disease have the same condition as the SM 046. In fact, the young woman is the only person in the world who has lost all sense of fear because of this, but this was not always the case.

According to the information in the patient’s history, SM 046 did not have such a feature when he was born. In fact, the woman said that she was very afraid of the dark and did not know what to do when she was cornered by a Doberman dog in the forest.

All these events happened before Urbach-Wiethe disease destroyed her amygdala, and after this disease, no data could be found on the woman’s fear record.

A Harvard University professor describes what SM 046 experienced as “impossible”

Elizabeth Phelps, Professor of Human Neuroscience and Pershing Square, who reviewed all the articles on SM 046 to date, stated that it was impossible for SM 046 not to have such a highly dominant emotion as fear.

According to Phelps, the tests that the SM 046 was subjected to after losing its sense of fear caused further damage to the amygdala and the reason behind the loss of fear was not the disease, but these tests.

Phelps also thinks that SM 046 may have turned off the brain’s fear mechanism to prove that it was truly fearless, shaped by the tests the subconscious was subjected to.