Fears of the dark, snakes, heights, spiders, clowns are just some of the huge list of phobias that people suffer from. Irrational fear of this kind is almost impossible to control, and it often gives patients a lot of inconvenience.
Now scientists have figured out how any phobia can be completely cured overnight. However, most likely, most people will still prefer to treat phobias in some other way, because in this case you will have to sacrifice a small part of their own brain.
This discovery was made completely by accident. The 44-year-old man developed severe seizures and was taken to hospital. Doctors scanned the patient's brain.
It turned out that the man has an anomaly in the left amygdala, an area of the temporal lobe, which is also involved in emotional reactions.
Further tests revealed that the cause was sarcoidosis, a rare condition that causes damage to the lungs, skin, and sometimes the brain.
The doctors decided that the man's damaged left tonsil should be removed. The operation was successful, but only soon after that the patient began to notice strange things. In addition to starting to have an aversion to music, he also stopped being afraid of spiders.
Interestingly, over time, his dislike for music passed, but his arachnophobia never returned. Meanwhile, before the operation, he could not touch the arthropods - he threw tennis balls at them or used hairspray to immobilize the reptile who had crawled into the house, and then got rid of him thanks to a vacuum cleaner.
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Now the man observes spiders from close range, easily touches them and assures that he finds them very entertaining. True, he did not notice any changes in other fears and anxieties (for example, both now and before the operation, he was uncomfortable with public speaking).
The patient was studied by a research team led by Nick Medford of Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Medford argues that there may be different types of fear, and it is difficult to understand how exactly removing an area of the brain neutralized the phobic response.
“Sometimes you see a snake and walk out of this place in alarm, but when you look around you realize that it was just a stick,” explains Medford. “This panic is a survival response, and it's a quick response. But there are also fears that are based on the assessment of the object."
The researcher suggests that, in this patient's case, some of the neural pathways associated with the panic response were eliminated with the removal of the left amygdala, while the parts of the amygdala responsible for generalized fear remained intact.
Unfortunately (but for the patient, of course, fortunately), the man had no other pronounced phobias, so it is not possible to assess whether any of his other reactions have changed.
Nevertheless, Medford believes that the theory can be tested with other patients: it is not uncommon for temporal lobe surgery to be performed for severe forms of epilepsy. Many phobias are extremely common, so one could observe how people feel about their fears before and after surgery.
The amygdala is too deep in the brain to try to destroy it with non-invasive treatments to treat other people and their phobias. However, many other ways to relieve phobias are currently being tested, including affecting blood pressure, treating sleep fears, and stimulating specific areas of the brain to erase fearful memories.
A research paper by Medford et al. Was published in Neurocase.