No sweaty palms, No jolt of panic

On a bright afternoon at Disneyland in 2012, Jordy Cernik strapped himself into a rollercoaster and waited for the familiar rush of adrenaline. The clanking ascent, the plunge into speed—this was the moment his stomach should drop, his heart should pound.

Instead, nothing.

No sweaty palms. No jolt of panic. Just silence in his body where fear used to live.

Jordy, a British man treated for Cushing’s syndrome by having his adrenal glands removed, had lost the ability to feel afraid. Later he would leap out of planes, zip-wire off Newcastle’s Tyne Bridge, and abseil down London’s Shard without so much as a quickened pulse. For him, what most people call terror is just another Tuesday.

And Jordy isn’t alone.

The woman who couldn’t be scared

Decades earlier in Iowa, doctors met a woman known as “SM.” She has Urbach–Wiethe disease, a rare genetic condition that destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped brain structure thought to govern fear.

Scientists tried everything: horror films, haunted houses, snakes, spiders. Instead of flinching, SM leaned in. “She had this almost overwhelming curiosity,” recalls Dr Justin Feinstein, a neuropsychologist who studied her. “She didn’t just fail to avoid danger—she sought it out.”

SM can laugh, cry and rage like anyone else. But fear—the instinct that keeps most of us alive—is absent.

Too little fear, too much risk

That absence has consequences. SM has been held at gunpoint and knifepoint more than once. She also stands so close to strangers that researchers measured her “comfort zone” at just over a foot—half the distance most people maintain.

“Her case shows that the amygdala isn’t only about fight-or-flight,” says psychologist Alexander Shackman. “It helps us navigate social life, too.”

When panic breaks through

But fear isn’t completely gone. In a striking experiment, Feinstein asked SM to inhale carbon dioxide—tricking her body into thinking it was suffocating. To her own astonishment, she panicked. It was the first full-blown terror she had felt in decades.

The experiment revealed a split in the brain’s wiring: external threats like predators or attackers rely on the amygdala, but internal threats, such as suffocation, are managed by the brainstem. With her amygdala destroyed, SM’s brainstem went unchecked, flooding her with fear.

Why we still need fear

For most animals, fear is survival. A mouse without an amygdala survives minutes in the wild before becoming lunch. Fear sharpens instincts, makes bodies sprint and hearts hammer. It’s biology’s built-in alarm system.

And yet SM has lived half a century without hers. Jordy, too, moves through the world unfazed by heights, speed, or risk. Their stories raise a tantalising question: in modern life, where predators no longer stalk us, do we sometimes suffer from too much fear rather than too little?

“Fear may once have saved us from lions and cliffs,” Feinstein says. “But today it often feeds stress and anxiety. Maybe the challenge now is learning when to silence it.”

On paper, Jordy Cernik has the kind of courage adrenaline junkies would envy. He has hurled himself from planes, dangled off skyscrapers, and zipped across dizzying bridges without so much as a flicker of fear.

But he insists it isn’t bravery. It’s emptiness.

“I don’t get that rush everyone talks about,” he admits. “It’s not courage, it’s just… nothing.”

That “nothing” can feel hollow. Fear, after all, doesn’t just protect us—it colours life with urgency, sharpens moments, makes victories sweeter. Without it, Jordy says, the world can sometimes feel oddly flat, as if one of life’s most vivid emotions has been erased.

For SM in Iowa, and Jordy in Newcastle, the absence of fear has opened unusual doors but also exposed real dangers. Their lives highlight the strange paradox of fear: too much of it cripples us, too little can leave us vulnerable, but just enough is what keeps us alive and makes life thrilling.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate reminder—that fear isn’t just something to overcome, but something that makes us human.

Source: BBC