A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 10
All right, this is just bizarre: Meet the woman without fear:
A woman known only as SM is walking through Waverly Hills Sanatorium, reputedly one of the “most haunted” places in the world. Now a tourist attraction, the building transforms into a haunted house every Halloween, complete with elaborate decorations, spooky noises and actors dressed in monstrous costumes. The experience is silly but still unnerving and the ‘monsters’ often manage to score frights from the visitors by leaping out of hidden corners.
But not SM. While others show trepidation before walking down empty corridors, she leads the way and beckons her companions to follow. When monsters leap out, she never screams in fright; instead, she laughs, approaches and talks to them. She even scares one of the monsters by poking it in the head.
SM is a woman without fear. She doesn’t feel it. She has been held at knifepoint without a tinge of panic. She’ll happily handle live snakes and spiders, even though she claims not to like them. She can sit through reels of upsetting footage without a single start. And all because a pair of almond-shaped structures in her brain — amygdalae — have been destroyed.
Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio and Daniel Tranel at the University of Iowa have been working with SM for over a decade. She is a 44-year old mother-of-three, who suffers from a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which has caused parts of her brain to harden and waste away. This creeping damage has completely destroyed her amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotion (white arrows in the diagram below). She’s one of the few people who shows such a striking pattern of damage.
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Other events in SM’s life are less benign. Fourteen years ago, she was walking through a small park at 10pm, when a man beckoned her over to a bench. As she approached, he pulled her down stuck a knife to her throat and said, “I’m going to cut you, bitch!” SM didn’t panic; she didn’t feel afraid. Hearing a church choir sing in the distance, she confidently said, “If you’re going to kill me, you’re gonna have to go through my God’s angels first.” The man let her go and she walked (not ran) away. The next day, she returned to the same park.
These sorts of things happen to her a lot. It’s not that SM has had a cosseted life. She lives in a poor area “replete with crime, drugs and danger”. As Feinstein writes, “she has been held up at knife point and at gun point, she was once physically accosted by a woman twice her size, she was nearly killed in an act of domestic violence, and on more than one occasion she has been explicitly threatened with death.” But in most of these situations, she didn’t act with urgency or desperation, something that police reports have corroborated.
We’ve seen iconic movie figures who seemingly have no fear: Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry series. James Bond. Pick any superhero. No fear.
But we expect that with cops, spies and superheroes. What about a housewife? Like SM, she lives in a crime-ridden part of a city. Perhaps she’s mugged. Beaten in the head. The assault does something to her brain. Now she no longer feels any fear.
What could you do with that as a storyteller?
Another angle: Scientists come up with a drug that causes recipients to be free from fear. What would you do with that if you owned that drug? Create an army of totally fearless soldiers? Form the ultimate terrorist cell?
Anything here with this story idea?