Word: sm
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...another trial, SM was asked to walk toward an experimenter and stop at the point at which she felt the distance was comfortable. SM walked until her nose was virtually touching the experimenter's, all the while saying she felt perfectly at ease...
...have been studying a 42-year-old woman who has such severe damage to her amygdalae - due to a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes calcification in the temporal lobes - that they have stopped functioning. The patient's identity isn't public, but neuroscientists call her SM, and a new paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience reports the results of experiments judging her conception of personal space...
...team of scientists from Caltech put SM through a series of tests in which they asked her to indicate the position at which she became uncomfortable as another woman, a researcher, approached her. SM's preferred personal distance was 1.1 ft. (0.34 m), about half the preferred distance (2 ft., or 0.64 m) of a group of comparison subjects. At 1 ft., you can easily discern whether someone showered after the gym - although in the lab experiment, the Caltech researchers made sure the experimenter was well-scrubbed and had just chewed gum before interacting with SM. (See pictures from...
Because the new paper is mostly based on one unusual subject, it shouldn't be overinterpreted. But the findings may have relevance for research into autism, whose sufferers sometimes have trouble understanding personal space and are thought to have amygdalae impairment. Previous studies of SM show that her brain impairment makes it difficult for her to recognize expressions of fear or judge a person's trustworthiness - problems that are also common among people with autism. Researchers think people who suffer from extreme shyness may turn out to have a problem in their temporal lobes as well. There's no known...
...SM...