One man accidentally got rid of his life-long phobia after going through a surgery that removed part of his brain.
Prior to the operation, the 44-year-old patient had an irrational fear of spiders, but this was eliminated as a positive effect of his surgery.
In a study set to be published in Neurocase: The Neural Basis of Cognition on Jan. 27, Nick Medford from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and his colleagues observed the patient and described how the man eliminated his arachnophobia after part of his brain was surgically removed.
Medford and colleagues wrote that the patient was suffering from sarcoidosis, a rare condition that can cause damage to organs including the lungs, skin and brain.
The damage caused by the disease to the man's left amygdala, a region in the brain involved with emotions, appeared to be causing severe and sudden seizures so the doctors recommended removing this damaged part of his brain.
The operation went smoothly but the patient noticed two things after his operation: he developed an odd "stomach-lurching" repulsion for music but also no longer felt scared of spiders, which he had an intense fear of all his life.
The man's aversion to music eventually waned but his arachnophobia has disappeared. The man is now even able to touch spiders and said that he actually finds the little critters fascinating.
Some of his fears and anxieties appear to be unaffected, though. For instance, he still feels anxious about public speaking just as before.
"We report the case of a patient in whom arachnophobia was abolished after left temporal mesial lobectomy, with unchanged fear responses to other stimuli," Medford and colleagues wrote.
Medford thinks that the removal of the patient's left amygdala may have eliminated some of the neural pathways involved in panic-type fear response, or unreasonable fear, while parts of his amygdala that were involved in generalized fear were kept intact.
Because arachnophobia is quite common, the researchers said they could keep tabs on patients who would undergo similar procedures in the future to see if the surgery would also cure some of them from their fear of spiders.
"It's not uncommon for people to have temporal lobe surgery for severe epilepsy. And arachnophobia is supposed to be reasonably common," Medford said. "So we might be able to test people for that phobia, or any other kind, before and after surgery."
