‘Boo, you’re through! Hoo, I’m true!’ –James Joyce
Cars kill a lot more people than spiders, bats, snakes and wolves, but why don’t we fear them in the same visceral way? (…)
Although some of us fear snakes more than others, all baby humans, chimps and monkeys are equally jumpy when confronted with a black plastic snake. That aversion probably grew out of the pressures of life in the jungle eons ago. Back then, encounters with certain snakes were a matter of life and death, and a healthy fear of snakes kept our ancestors alive long enough to procreate.
In the field of evolutionary psychology, the belief is that instinctive fears became hard-wired in our biology, through genes or other inheritance, during the time (the Stone Age) and place (the African jungle and savannah) of our development into the Homo sapiens we are today.
But some new thinking suggests that these adaptations might date back before the Stone Age, and some, perhaps, to more recent times. (…)
Fear of heights is so widespread and understandable that psychologists consider it a normal fear. (…) Other phobias that persist into modern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100,000 years ago, or even more recently.
Take fainting in response to seeing blood or surgical instruments. Fainting, Bracha posits, might have been an adaptive female response to the frequent raiding bands in the early hunting-and-gathering societies. You might have been less likely to be murdered if you fainted at the sight of a sharp stick.
Then there are the fears that point to inherently dangerous things and that no doubt have an “adaptive” function, except that they’ve gotten out of hand. Fears of dirt, rats, mice and insects are obviously self-protective, since all these carry diseases. But most vermin-spread diseases probably were not a serious problem before people began creating cities several thousand years ago.
Instinctual repulsion to some of these critters, Bracha hypothesizes, might have arisen in the Neolithic period, which started about 10,000 years ago.
So why do some of us appear to be addicted to fear, as evidenced by the popularity of increasingly horrifying horror movies? (…)
“They are people who need strong feelings of arousal, and they get those from horror movies as well as sexy movies. Low-sensation-seekers don’t like to be aroused by unpleasant things. High-sensation-seekers can enjoy any vicarious experience if it’s strong enough.”
photo { Helmut Newton }
