Fear

How often do most people feel fear? There are any number of possible sources of fear in our everyday lives. Every time you get in a car, there's a very real chance of being in a car crash (not necessarily a high percentage, but if someone drives a car for 50 years, they'll have a 1% chance of dying in a car crash). When you're older, the risk of crashing your own car decreases, but heart conditions, mental problems, and even cancer become more of a possibility. And those of us with active imaginations have it worse: every creak of a floorboard, or pitter patter of footsteps, or howling of the wind creates monsters, ghosts, and murderers from thin air.

It's interesting then how most people enjoy frightening themselves needlessly. Of course, as someone gets older they become increasingly hard to frighten. And some people are simply more easily scared than others. But that doesn't deter millions of people from going to see (usually bloody) horror movies, or reading Stephen King, or visit haunted houses on Halloween. While it is true that being afraid can also cause excitement, the very fact that our pumpkin-centric holiday is so popular is evidence that we celebrate being scared of witches, vampires, and things that go bump in the night (or we at least use them as an excuse to dress sluttily and throw parties).

Where does fear come from then? When we encounter a "scary" stimulus, a message is sent to the thalamus. A short-path signal is sent to the hypothamalus, setting off our fight-or-flight reaction. But a long-path signal goes also through the hippocampus, and by the time it also reaches the hypothalamus, our brains have decided whether or not the fight-or-flight response is justified. Some people react to the fight-or-flight response differently; there's the deer-in-the-headlights reaction, and there's the scream-bloody-murder reaction.

In that case, what makes a stimulus "scary"? Why do we fear? The simple answer: survival. Those animals which were afraid of the right things succeeded in reproducing. If we weren't afraid of forest fires, unstable bridges and oncoming traffic, many of us would be out of luck. Being afraid of things like lions and darkness is a result of our ancestors benefiting from that fear. And, when we are young, we learn to fear things that aren't intuitive, from conditioned responses like dog bites or burning ourselves.

So when was the last time you were truly afraid? Your breathing speeds up, your heart races, and your muscles tighten. You're rooted to the spot, your mind is running at a mile a minute, and all you can think of is how bleak your future is looking.