The Science of Courage

By examining the brain patterns of people who demonstrate courage in the face of fear, scientists are hoping to find a way to rid people of their most irrational phobias. “Why would anyone put people who are afraid of snakes into a brain scanner, alongside the cause of their fear? To work out what is going on in the brain when people display courage, of course. This was the strategy used by Uri Nili and Yadin Dudai, at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, and it showed that courage does not come when we completely banish fear, but through overcoming it enough to act.”