For the serious cowards among us, the chronic need to conquer fear can get tedious. Why not just skip the anterior cingulate reveille and muzzle the brain's fear response for good? The story of SM, a 44-year-old woman whose rare genetic condition has selectively destroyed the brain's twinned set of amygdala, shows the clear downside of a life without fear.
对于我们当中具有严重胆怯的人来说，习惯性的克服恐惧的需要会变得乏味起来。何不干脆一劳永逸地无视大脑前扣带的起床号，让大脑对恐惧的反应缄默呢？那个SM的故事，一位患有罕见遗传病的44岁女人选择性地破坏其大脑孪生杏黄体集之后的结果，表明了缺乏恐惧的生活的明显缺陷。
As Justin Feinstein, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa, and his colleagues describe in Current Biology, the otherwise normal SM is incapable of being spooked.
正如衣阿华大学的临床神经心理学家贾斯汀·范士丹（Justin Feinstein）及其同事在《当代生物学》杂志中所描述的那样，在其他方面正常的SM对受惊吓已无反应。
She claimed to fear snakes and spiders, and maybe she did in her pre-disease childhood, but when the researchers took her to an exotic pet store, they were astonished to see that not only did she not avoid the snakes and spiders, she was desperate to hold them close.
她宣称害怕蛇和蜘蛛，也许她在患病前的儿童时期的确如此，但是当她被研究人员带到一个国外的宠物店的时候，他们惊奇地发现，她不仅不回避蛇和蜘蛛，而且还拼命抓起它们套近乎。
The researchers took SM to a haunted house, and she laughed at the scary parts and blithely made the monster-suited employees jump. She was shown clips from famous horror films like "The Silence of Lambs" and "Halloween," and she showed no flickers of fright.
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