let me start by saying *sigh*.
Yes, I know it's science fiction. I love it as much as anyone. I will always try to come to firefly parties and it's still my favorite episode. And now the Suck.
When Simon put River into the brain scanner thingamajig he explains to a curious Jayne that 'they stripped her amygdala', and then explains that the amygdala allows you to repress emotion and hold back feelings.
Not only is this not correct, but River demonstrates behavior inconsistent with a lesion or damage to the Amygdala.
The amygdala is part of the limbic system, which as whedon guessed, is related to emotional processing. The amygdala, as current research shows, is involved in associating emotion with memory and learning. It's absence results in no memory-based emotional behavior. Suppose you see the switch your mother used to beat you with. Most people would have a strong emotional reaction to the memory. A person with a lesion to the amygdala would have no reaction to it, but would recognize it.
Destroying this part of the brain also prevents pavlovian training. Were you born without one, you would only stop touching the hot stove when you figured out that the pain was related to the action consciously, you wouldn't jerk your hand away and be scared, you would perhaps feel silly for doing it again when you know it hurts you.
Also the amygdala is a full third of the primary olfactory cortex, and it's removal would prevent her from smelling a lot of things. We can assume that the few times she does react to smell and taste it happens to be something from her pyriform and entorhinal cortices.
So...I think we would all agree that River's behavior, however disturbed, does not come from an emotional disconnection, inability to commit things to memory, or lack of emotional association with items in memory. She does a few of these from time to time, but it's inconsistent. The 'lesion' or 'stripping' would have knocked out all the reactions to emotion that she does experience, even biochemically she would not have 'stress hormones' to maximize her ability to respond to danger.
Well, while I don't expect a sci fi writer to be a neurologist, I do expect him to wiki a term he's planning to use. Granted firefly came out before wiki was as huge as it is, but looking it up (or ordering an intern to do so) would have given the science in his science fiction some more credibility.
Now yes, he could include the idea that massive advances in medicine (apparent in the same episode) could reveal new truths about the brain. But if that were his goal, he should have, as he did with the drug "dilavtin" (a corruption of dilantin), made something up that sounded good. He did enough to grasp the idea of pharmacodynamics, in that simon chews out a doc for not recalling the interactions between two drugs that nearly kills a patient.
so, a little disappointed, I still love firefly, and now I hate neuro even more.
For a "layman with some school under his belt" explanation of the amygdala, I will link you to wiki. For further, check out Nolte's "The Human Brain", should be at the library, maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala
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