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Commensurate with the importance of rapidly and efficiently evaluating motivationally significant stimuli, humans are probably endowed with distinct faculties^, and maintain specialized neural structures to enhance their detection. Here we consider that a critical function of the human amygdala^, is to enhance the perception of stimuli that have emotional significance. Under conditions of limited attention for normal perceptual awareness—that is, the attentional blink^,—we show that healthy observers demonstrate robust benefits for the perception of verbal stimuli of aversive content compared with stimuli of neutral content. In contrast, a patient with bilateral amygdala damage has no enhanced perception for such aversive stimulus events. Examination of patients with either left or right amygdala resections shows that the enhanced perception of aversive words depends specifically on the left amygdala. All patients …