"Also, I can kill you with my brain."

Since Joss Whedon's Birthday last week, I've been watching his work almost obsessively. I can barely keep from gushing over his genius when it comes to developing complex, wonderfully flawed characters and worlds; however, when it comes to science, Joss falls victim to the same trap that ensnares many a science fiction writer: lack of research.

Take Firefly and Serenity's River Tam (played by geek fantasy Summer Glau...not relevant, but oh-so awesome): she's a girl genius who was abducted by the Alliance and whose amygdala was destroyed to turn her into a psychic warrior.



And I'm pretty sure that you know where I'm going with this: ablating the amygdalae (because there are actually two in the brain) will not render people psychic, even if you might seem predisposed to such abilities. It won't leave you an empath, either, as suggested by supposed doctor-genius Simon on the show ("[River] feels everything; she can't not"). If anything, it would do quite the opposite: she would experience a flattened affect.

The amygdala is a little almond-shaped structure found in the limbic area of the temporal lobe. It's a pretty nifty structure, being associated with our sense of meaningfulness, with aggression and sexuality, fear conditioning, and with processing smells. Bilateral destruction of the amygdalae is generally associated with a phenomenon known as Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (Kluver and Bucy interestingly enough became interested in temporal lobe functions through experiments involving the effects of mescaline and peyote on human consciousness). The syndrome is marked by fearlessness, hypersexuality, and hyperorality. Sure, River had her eccentricities, and some shows of fearlessness, but she definitely wasn't walking around constantly performing sexual acts and putting things into her mouth.

If anything, River's behaviour seems to suggest that her amygdala may have been stimulated, rather than scrambled; Daniels goes so far to suggest that her behaviour, her nightmares, her inappropriate reactions might stem from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) thanks to her horrific experiences at the Alliance's hands.

The brain is so exciting; it saddens me that TPTB don't take more time to research before hamming out fake facts while devoting so much time to the abstract facets of character and plot.

Inspired by:

Daniels, Bradley J. "'Stripping' River Tam's Amygdala". The Psychology of Joss Whedon.. 2007.

Firefly, Serenity and their characters are owned by Twentieth Century Fox.