This is the story of a surgical operation against epileptic seizures, which inadvertently suppresses the phobia of spiders suffered by the patient.
Suffering from recurrent seizures, a 44-year-old British businessman had to undergo surgery to remove histonsil, a region of the brain involved in emotional reactions.
Additional studies of his brain have revealed a rare disease: granulomatous encephalitis, an infection caused by a pathogenic germ.
The damaged amygdala could be removed successfully, however other unexpected reactions occurred in the patient.
A phobia transformed into fascination
Before the operation, the 40-year-old had a phobia spiders difficult to control. When a spider appeared in his house, he would throw tennis balls at it from afar to kill it, or use hairspray to immobilize it before vacuuming it off.
But strangely, after the operation, the patient realized that this phobia had completely disappeared: he can now touch spiders and even finds them “fascinating”.
In addition, the patient also described stomach aches “aversion to music”, intense during television commercials in particular, which calmed down shortly after the operation.
The damaged ‘rushed response’ area
It is likely that the phobia was “taken away” when part of the brain of the patient was operated, according to Dr Nick Medford of Brighton Medical School (UK).
The doctor thus distinguishes two types of fears.
“It’s like when you see a snake and jump back reflexively, and you realize it’s just a stick,” he explains in an interview with New Scientist. “This is your ‘rushed’ answer: it is not very precise, but it is necessary for our survival. And then there is the ‘assessed’ fear, more nuanced, which is more precise but which takes time to set up. “
In the patient’s case, it was the ‘rushed’ fear, the panic reaction that was suppressed with the amygdala, while the so-called ‘assessed’ fear remained intact.
For Dr Medford, this unexpected effect could be tested again on epileptic and phobic patients whose amygdala will have to be removed. For now, other medical approaches are being tested for people with arachnophobia, such as the pill regulating blood arterial pressure, or the stimulation of specific areas of the brain to erase terrifying memories associated with spiders.
