Fear Not

Fear is one of those things that can really hamper people. Fear of not knowing how things are going to turn out can keep you from taking action. Fear of the “unknown” can be difficult to handle. Fear of failure can prevent you from taking chances. In some ways, conquering fear may be the real key to success in life. But what would it be like if you didn’t have any fear at all? Some recent studies shed light on this question.

A structure in the mammalian brain called the amygdala is active when you are afraid. The amygdala is also active when you are angry. So, fear and anger are pretty much physiologically identical. If the medial amygdala (middle of it) is destroyed, an animal will be put in a hyper vigilant fear state. The animal would be scared of its own shadow. However, if the lateral amygdala (side of it) is destroyed, an animal will basically lose its ability to be afraid. This has been shown in numerous experiments with rats. For obvious reasons, this kind of research is unethical to perform on humans.

What happens when an animal loses its ability to be afraid? Rats that were afraid of heights ran elevated mazes that they would normally avoid. Some of them fell and injured themselves. Small rats that would normally cower to larger rats would pick fights with them. Many of these rats got hurt. You have to be careful generalizing from animal studies to humans, but the results suggest that the absence of fear can lead to taking unnecessarily dangerous risks.

A little fear is a good thing if the object of our fear is a realistic danger. This is similar to the idea that a little stress can be good for you because it can be a motivator. It’s when fear and stress interfere and cause us to limit our actions that we have a problem. If you have such a fear of heights that being in a two or three story building gives you a panic attack, that can be a big problem. But fear of heights can be a good thing at other times. If you get too far off the ground, you can fall and hurt yourself (or worse!). Jumping out of an airplane might be a rush but we need to give ourselves a break if we are too afraid to do that. We need to keep things in perspective. Some fear is okay. In some cases, it might end up prolonging our lives.