Fear and Panic in Iowa City: Narratives, Affects, and Amygdalae

Overturning assumptions about the neural location of fear in humans, University of Iowa neuroscientists successfully frightened the previously “fearless” Patient S.M. in 2013. Examining this Iowa study on fear as a productive problem for both neuroscience reporting and studies of affect in the humanities, this article asks how narratives of fear travel to implicate our understanding of contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences. It questions the ways in which scientific case studies themselves, alongside popular scientific and philosophical appropriations of scientific material, are determined by affective responses formed in relation to narrative.