June 2, 2011 • 43 mins
Fear results from your brain's reaction to a stressful stimulus, and -- though it may be unpleasant -- it plays a crucial role in the life of every human being. But how does it work (and why)? Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the sensation of fear.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know
from House stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryant is
looking deeply into the eyes of Nicola Tesla right now.
(00:23):
For some reason, I never noticed that he literally is
staring at me the whole time. You know, I once
wrote an article for how stuff Works dot Com about
why the eyes and some paintings follow you. Oh really, Yeah, dude,
why didn't you tell me about that? I don't know.
We've never a podcast about it because it would literally
be like a five minute podcast. Well, maybe we can
bring it up, but yeah, your podcast. Maybe it's worth reading, though.
(00:47):
I think if you typed in eyes and painting or
something like that in the search bar how stuff works
dot Com, it would bring it up. I figured it
was because the eyes were cut out and there was
a psychopathic killer behind. It's a painting, that's to the
second paget. Also, while we're just doing pluggyness, right, why
don't you follow us on Twitter? It's a it's a
(01:09):
party over there, right. Our handle sometimes not what you
think right off the top of your head. But it
makes sense when you hear it s Y s K podcast, right,
And there's no like We're not like um Justin Bieber
or Lady Gaga. We don't say stupid stuff about being backstage.
We're actually a cool news aggregator, right, okay? Uh? And
(01:34):
then also we're on Facebook. We have a stuff you
should know Facebook page, Chuck and Chuck. You kill it
on that interacting with people coming out, shaking hands in
your robe and you know, with a little shrimp in
your mouth from being in the green room. You know, Hey,
how's it going, good to meet you? Thanks for coming out.
I can't imagine any were disgusting any coming at someone
with a robe and shrimp in my well. It happens
every day on Facebook, right, Um. And then I guess
(01:56):
now are you ready for the intro? Yes? Yeah, I
want I want you to go back with me to
uh alright, freshman in college. Baby, I'm a freshman in
high school. And um, I am in my room in
uh Kennesaw, Georgia, in my parents house, and it's nighttime
(02:17):
and I'm reading I don't remember what I'm reading, but
I'm like sitting on my bed reading. I'm actually laying
with my elbows up on my bed reading right. Um,
And I look over and notice that my closet door
is cracked slightly. This is abnormal. Usually my closet door
is shut tightly. Still. Uh yeah, even still, even still
(02:38):
to this day, I don't see any reason to leave
it open. It's funny how this little thing stick around.
So I remember making this little comment to myself, like, oh,
you know, that's that's weird. It's probably somebody in there, right,
But I go back to reading, and uh, I get this,
this annoying sensation. That's like getting my attention out of
the corner of my eye. And I look over and
(03:00):
now the door is correct by about three times more
than it was before. Well, I have tremendous amounts of sense.
So I throw my book down and start running towards
the door of my room. Right as I get to
my to the handle, my hands on the door knob
and starting to turn it, the closet door is thrown open.
And my dad, because I'm going I'm not kidding, this
(03:20):
is a true story. I went from a standing position
with my hand on the door knob to completely flat
on my back and like maybe a half of a motion.
It wasn't even one full motion, right, I was on
my back, screaming, staring at my dad, screaming in terror,
looking at him like you were looking at Nikola Tesla.
I see that it's my dad, but I'm so afraid
(03:42):
that I can't stop screaming. My mom has time to
make it up the stairs into my room and start
yelling at my dad, asking what did you do to Josh?
And I'm sitting there looking at them having this argument,
still screaming, going back and forth. Character. He is a character.
He looked so sad and so remorseful, realized. But I
(04:07):
I don't think I was wrong in in in noticing
a little glimmer of disappointment in his eye, like what
happened to you? Kid? Did you get to be such
a panny waist? So there is my fear story, Chuck,
that's my great fear story. We used to antagonize Eddie,
my friend Eddie in college. He was his roommates to
(04:28):
Eddy for years and we scare him all the time,
so awful, like coming home from the movie what was
the one with the author the James con Oh Misery misery,
came home from misery and like mate Bouten, literally unsto
screwed lightbulbs all over the apartment like hid in closets.
(04:50):
Eddie was smart enough to turn on the television for
light that we didn't count on that next time we
unplug the TV. It's tough to give him past that. Yeah,
it was always fun and he got to kick out
of it too, you could tell, which we'll get too later.
So yeah, we're gonna get to a lot in this one. Right,
This is how fear works. This is gonna be a
good one. I think. I think it already is. Well, okay,
thanks to your story. So, Chuck, I think we should
(05:12):
start out by basically defining fear. Webster's Dictionary defines fear
as such river in high school, and that was just
the way to start your You thought you were so smart. Yeah, uh,
it defines it. It doesn't, but we define it as
a chain reaction in the brain starts with a stimuli
can be many different things, and it ends up with
(05:33):
the fight or flight response in the end, exactly which
we know that you know about the fireflight response. Having
listened to this podcast faithfully since two thousand eight, yes, right. Um,
So we're not gonna go into too much detail about
the fireflight response because you already know this, but suffice
to say that fear is an autonomic response, which so
(05:55):
the autonomic nervous system. We've never mentioned this before. It's
really nervous. It is the nervous system that responds to stress,
and it's made up of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic
nervous systems. I don't think we have talked about that happened, no,
but it's like the umbrella nervous system that's like whoa,
okay and then calm down right right, And autonomic I
(06:16):
mean it almost means automatic in this case because it's
just triggered. We don't plan it. That just happens. That
pointer Sister's song could have been called autonomic. It's so interchangeable,
you know. Um so, yeah, well, there's not a lot
we can do, and we don't necessarily know what's going on.
Like um, analysis of the situation isn't necessarily a part
(06:39):
of being afraid. It's more like get out of there, right. Yeah,
we'll find yeah, we'll find that there's other ways that
that can happen right, coming soon as in a few minutes. Yeah,
So let's let's just go over what parts of the
brain are responsible for fear, right, Yeah, and this will
come up in in a in a minute here when
we describe how the paths go, there's just ended it.
(07:04):
But the thalamus um picks up on things that you
hear and see and smell um and in the way
of sensory data. Uh, sensory cortex interprets this. You got.
The hippocampus its stores the sea horse. Yes, that's right.
It's stores and receives conscious memories and starts to establish
like a context for what's going on. In this case,
(07:26):
fear amygdala plays a big part. It decodes the emotions
and determines the threat and stores old fear memories, fear
memories like if if something really bad happens to you
and you have to create like a real fear memory.
The amygdalas where that sits, okay, And then finally the
hypothalamus is where it always ends up no matter which
path it takes. People talk about those paths. The hypothalamus
(07:49):
is the on off switch for the fight or flight response.
It makes it's go time, and the only part of
your brain that can tell the hypothalamus whether it's go
time or whether go time is past. Is the right
It's the gate keeper to the autonomic nervous system. I'm
still just as thrilled about the brain as I was
when we first started studying this stuff. I know, I
think I'm more thrills. Yeah, so, Chuck, Josh. There is
(08:13):
a guy named Joseph Ledo. Have you heard of him?
He is a nervoscientist at n y U. And he
came up with two categories for our fear response. Yeah,
and they happened simultaneously. But there is what he's dubbed
a low road and a high road. And like I said,
(08:33):
both of them happened at the same time. Um. But
the low road is basically like the quick, nasty, dirty
response to fear, right, like, holy crap. Right, So um,
let's say there's a pretty good example in this article
by Julia Layton. Yeah, actually, both of the ones who
are recording today or Julia Layne's Yeah, way to go Layton,
She's good. Um. So, uh, let's say that you're sitting
(08:56):
at home, right and your underwear with a beer perched
on your stomach, and you're just watching some wrestling have
you been watching me have webcams set up in your house?
You do a lot of stuff because I encourage you
too without you know it. Okay, um uh, So you're
sitting at home as such, and um, all of a sudden,
(09:19):
your door just starts rattling, right, yeah, Okay, there's something
that's going to happen called the low road for your response,
and that is the sound and the sight of your
door rattling is the century data that suddenly goes into
what the thalamus, which sorts it and says, hey, um, amygdala,
(09:40):
I need your help. It's like forwarding the email. Yeah,
like there is a potential threat here and we need
to respond. And the amigellas says, you know what, you're right, thalamus,
I'm going to contact the hypocampus now, the hypothalamus right
and and basically get the fear fight or flight response going. Yeah,
(10:03):
just like just in case, let's go ahead and turn
it on. Right. So you are now your beer is
spilled all over the floor because you left up out
of your your easy chair. Okay. At the same time
this is going on, um, the high road response is
taking place, thankfully. Yes, So the high road responses, uh
it takes longer, but it gives you a much more
(10:23):
thoughtful analysis of what's going on. There's a couple of
extra stops along the way. Uh, that leads to reason
and context and that kind of thing. So this time
it goes to the century cortex first, and the century
cortex says, you know, what, this has happened before or no,
it's it says like there's more than one interpretation. Has
(10:45):
it happened before? And the hippocampus says, you know, and
remember that time in that big windstorm the tree fell
outside and he thought of the boogeman was coming to
get you, So remember that, right, Like, the hippocampus goes
and gets your memories to to analyze them for context.
Compared to this, the sensory cortex is saying, like, what
(11:06):
else is going on here right there? At exactly? Is
their patio furniture moving? Are their trees scraping on the window?
And all of a sudden you're like, okay, it is
wind right, that's right. But let's say that your um,
your your your brain, your sensory cortex said, um, no,
what I hear is a guy shouting like I'm coming
(11:27):
in right and your hippocampus is like, well, last time
that happened, like guy came in a ski mask and
I was hog type for three days before anybody around me. Right,
it was not the wind. So that leap up out
of the easy chair is your low road response and
standing there while your brain is interpreting the rest of
the data and then coming to the conclusion that yeah,
(11:47):
there's somebody coming through the door and then running out
your back door. That's the result of the high road response. Yeah.
Or if you determine or inside the brain that hey,
this is just a windstorm, then it sends the message
to the amygdala saying, hey, go tell the hypothalamus just
shut down the whole system. Not the whole system, because
you'd be dead, but shut down the fight or flight response.
(12:09):
It's just trees. And Emily is on the ceiling still
at this point because her high road is probably longer
than mine and the low road very very quick. Yes,
we heard gun shots one time in l A and
Emily literally it was like on the floor. I turned around,
like did you hear that? And she was on the
ground like in prone position. Wow. But you know I
(12:32):
grew up rough tumble, so I heard gun shots a
lot more than she did. Did you have a hard
scrapple youth, I did. I don't even know that, not
like the the streets of acron Rare, Emily grew the
tender streets of acron Ohio. Yeah, they were very tender,
all right, Josh. So you pointed out, which is very important,
that both of these things are happening at the same time.
(12:52):
And that is why, even if you realize very quickly
that there is no imminent danger, you're still going me
coming down from that fight or flight response for a
little bit, because your low road has also already been triggered, right,
and it all ends on hypothal in the hypothalmus either way. Yes,
are we done? I guess? So that was really rapid, man.
(13:15):
Now we're not done, because we gotta talk about emotions,
right and why we get scared. Well, yeah, there's very
little um argument about what emotions are for, and basically
they are motivators, right, yep, they are survival based motivators. Specifically, um,
the basic ones there's uh, let's see, anger, fear, surprised discussed, joy,
(13:39):
and sadness. Those are the six basic emotions that an
anthropologist named Paul Ekman identified in the nineteen seventies. Right, yeah,
you see that's sick. Um, and uh, you know we're
talking about fear right now, but you could make the
this is the this is the case for all of
at least those basic, if not all, the emotions that
(14:00):
a human can experience. Is that their motivators. They're saying
there's something in going on with you, specifically right now
in your environment or in your life, and a kind
of a medicine or both. Right yeah, Um, with fear,
it's normally something's in your environment. Yeah, and it's clearly
a motivator to survive. Right. So um, let's say that, Um,
(14:25):
you're you're a caveman. Okay, So I'm back on the
couch with my bigger and um, you're sitting there, Uh
you see a snake. You just don't don't have a
very good feeling about it, so you don't go up
and touch it. But your friend Erg sitting next to you,
is like, well what is this? And Erg gets bit
(14:45):
and dies a horrible nasty death right in front of
your eyes. What happened to tuktok? Know you're tuktok Okay,
so um, you tuktok have just formed possibly the fear memory, uh,
in response to snakes. You are doing a very crude
(15:06):
interpretation of natural selection and evolution. You are going to
be able to go mate, and mayhaps that fear memory
will somehow epigenetically be passed on to your offspring and
then it's a trait eventually. Yes, So, um, fear is
a survival based motivator, right, Yeah, And Caveman is an
(15:28):
apt description because if you feared the right things back
in the day, like snakes and tigers and lightning, then
you had a good chance of surviving and procreating, and
all of a sudden you had a stronger, uh, smarter,
wiser population exactly. But all those is going on, you know,
long long, long ago, and a lot of people argue
(15:49):
long before we were humans, but you know, back when
we were still prey to snakes like primates, that's still
stuck around and that's probably where they first started. But um,
we didn't have any idea that this was evolution at work.
And it wasn't until like the late nineteenth century that
Darwin really kind of got the attention of the world
(16:11):
and said, hey, these are inherent traits that are passed
down like fear is not something that's necessarily learned. It's
something we have instinctively. And he conducted this pretty cool
little experiment that he wrote about in um his book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which
is published in eighteen seventy two, And he went to
the zoo right well, yeah, he was um specifically there.
(16:33):
The debate at the time was about the face of
fear the Edward monk, like, holy crap, face that everyone
gets when they're scared. You took it as being scared.
I thought that was a scream of joy, the face
of fear, Yeah, our monk. Oh really, I thought he
was like I just got the best deal on this muffler.
It looked more to me like home alone. Oh my gosh.
(16:55):
Oh no, that was joy. Though at the time he
was glad his parents were gone. Right, No, no no, he was.
He couldn't believe it. That was I think surprised, and
then later joy and then later sadness. Yeah, when he
learned what we all know eventually, the family is important,
and don't fear the creepy old man in your neighborhood.
Actually you probably should, probably should. I think Chris Colemus
did a great disservice to children by by making that
(17:18):
a moral Alright, So yeah, I always interpreted monks because
it was called the scream as as terror, regardless that
face we all make when we're scared, you know, out
of our pants. Uh. He went and Darwin went and
stood in front of a clear uh PLEXI I guess
it was quite glass at the time, I would think
(17:39):
it was, and had a puff adder jump, you know,
leaped towards his face. Even though he knew he was protected,
he still reacted with that fear face and jumped back.
And he said basically that, uh, my will and reason
were powerless against the imagination of danger, even though he's
never experienced it. So like I've never been bitten by
(17:59):
a snake, but or actually they said that people that
have never even Yeah, So he came to this conclusion
that that fear and you know, likely all of our
basic emotions are very much passed down through the generations, right,
And uh, he came to that conclusion because he couldn't
(18:20):
control himself when the snake, which you'd never been bitten by,
um lunged at the glass which was safely in between them.
He still couldn't control it. So he concluded, Yeah, there's
there's a lot more going onto this than you know.
This is something I've learned because why would I be
afraid of a snake? And I know rationally that there's
glass there, So that this stuff is so ancient. Are
(18:44):
modern trappings of civilization e g. A glass and a
zoo can't subdue it? Yeah? Yeah, the same at baseball
games when Pete they fouled the ball back and they know,
you know, there's a screen right in front of you,
and you will never get hit by a baseball, but
people still jump back and that bay maybe more that
may be less fear and more just an autonomic reaction
(19:06):
to something coming at you. That was Darwin's point. Really, Yeah,
it's the same thing. Yeah, because if we didn't experience fear,
like a baseball coming out would be like and then boom. Yeah,
same same with anything that we we moved to get
away from. You always feel like a goober too at
the game when that happens. Well, that's a that's a
(19:26):
higher um emotion that supposedly are specific to humans and
a couple of other higher primates, which is embarrassment that
only exists in relation to other people. Right, I don't
think I said the word goober in like a decade.
It's a good one, just flew out of my mouth.
I love goober's. I've said, can I have another goober?
But what was that? The peanut and chopped Yeah? Um,
(19:49):
so Chuck Darwin basically said, I'm right, you're wrong, you're idiots.
Um and uh. Fear is now seen as a a
basic emotional response, that's an inherited one. Yeah. And it's
the same as it was in the caveman days, except
it's not lines and tigers now it's people breaking into
your house, home invasion, terrorist attack. Well put um. And
(20:12):
then there's another point that Darwin made. I don't know
if he hammered at home, but um, we can anticipate things, right,
Like we don't have to see a snake by erg
to be afraid of a specific snake, right or have
it experienced right or um? And it doesn't go away
(20:34):
with each snake, like each new snake doesn't necessarily not
represent a new threat. Snakes in general do right. Um.
And that's because we can anticipate things right. That's another
survival mode that um, that fear triggers or that I
guess the centered around fear. We can anticipate being afraid,
and apparently studies have shown that we can become physiologically
(20:58):
and psychologically just does afraid when we anticipate being afraid
of something, then when we're actually confronted with that thing
we're afraid of. Yeah, well, which is like a fear
of flying would be a perfect example of that, Yes,
it would. You can be just as scared, probably as
if you have actually been in a plane crash, if
you have a really really intense phobia flying, dude, I
can tell you that even if you've ever been on
(21:20):
a even a remotely scary flight, you can very much
be afraid anticipatoryally of a plane crash. It's very scary.
You've gotten pretty good though, right, dude. I am great.
I slept through the last takeoff I was on. Really
I could not believe it. You mean, was like, who
are you checking your bolts? Yeah? Yeah, and nothing. I
(21:42):
was on no scotch, no pills, no nothing. You weren't
on scotch, no scotch. Well that's called fear extinction, and
we'll get to that. Yeah, more foreshadowing other precursor. That
was very anticipatory. So speaking of conditioning, which we were not.
Let's talk about a very cruel experiment in the night
twenties by Mr John Watson Little Albert. Little Albert was
(22:04):
an eleven month old baby. I think they call Albert
a toddler. They call him an infant, and that's a
baby starting to toddle, just starting the title, So a
little Albert. They wanted to teach Albert fear of white rats.
The problem was, I guess it wouldn't have problem is
probably pretty good for the sake of the experiment, was
that he loved white rats, and when the white rats
(22:26):
would come around, little Albert would even reach for them,
and guests try to pet them, and until they started
playing this loud booming noise. No you know what they did.
They took a claw hammer and a piece of metal
and burned it right behind his head every time he
went to go. That was the loud booming noise. So uh,
it didn't take long before Albert was crying and moving
(22:47):
away from the white rats as expected. And not just
white rats, chuck rabbits, really for coats, cotton balls. They
showed that fear isn't just think that we in hear it.
It can be conditioned, and little Albert became sick fried Fishbocker.
Here's the worst part. You ready for it. That's not true,
(23:09):
you're ready. Well, no one knows who little Albert is. Well,
he wasn't sick freed Fishbocker. Well you so, John Watson
UM was planning on reversing this fear conditioning, but was
caught having an affair with an assistant and was fired
before he could so exactly, and Um Watson went on
to UM get into the advertising game, and uh it
(23:33):
was successful and actually married I think the lady he
was having an affair with UM, but burned all of
his notes and I think before he died in so
no one to this day has any idea who what
when was this the nineteen twenties, so little Albert would
be old or dead, would be like probably dead, probably
died of fright at a young age. And that horrible.
(23:53):
That was pretty horrible. But out of this horrible old
time experiment, which if you're interested, I like top five
horrific psychological experiments for the blogs, this is one of them. Um.
The what came out of it was an understanding that
fear is conditioned, right, and if you can condition somebody.
(24:14):
If you can teach somebody to fear, you can teach
people to unfear. Yeah. Right, But before we get to that,
chuck more precursors. I think we should, um, I think
we should talk about some of the most common fears. Yeah,
I didn't realize that phobia is there are only three
main types, and I guess it's sort of a loose
A lot of them fall under these umbrellas, So that
(24:36):
must be the deal. Because a gooraphobia fear of places
where escape might not be be easy or help may
not be available. Oh, that's like a fear of big
open places. Yeah, but I think in a broader sense
it's just fear of of I may not be able
to get help in case I need it. You know.
One of the characteristics of agoraphobia in some cases is
(24:56):
like being afraid. You're like if you're out on the beach,
being afraid you won't have anything to grab onto and
just flying off the earth. Really yeah, yeah, like you
can't go into big open spaces. It's like the opposite
of claustrophobia. Joan Cusack on that show that awesome Showtime
show has a goora phobia. You can't lead the house.
And it's like really kind of heartbreaking, maybe because it's
(25:18):
Joan Cusack, you know, and you have like you want
good things for her, you want good things for the
whole Cusack family. Yeah, that's true. Uh. Social phobias obviously
have anything to do with people. And then specific phobias
is the third category, which is a bit of a
cop out because that's like everything else that you're afraid of,
including you're ready, phobophobia, fear a phobias, fear of fear,
(25:41):
fear of fear, that's everybody. No, this is like debilitating
phobia that you don't like that you're afraid of becoming
afraid at some point. So what do you just set
your life up very safely, like don't watch horror movies,
don't Okay, well should we read this gallop pole? Yeah,
and I couldn't find a more recent one. No, this
(26:02):
is probably fairly accurate. Still though with two thousand five
and sort of sad they pulled teenagers in the United
States and their top ten things they were afraid of
terrorist attacks was number one. I wonder if that's still
the case. I bet it's not. Maybe Spider's death failure,
war heights, crime, being alone in the future, and nuclear war.
(26:25):
And I made my own top five as a teenager,
as a Baptist teenager, like back then, you did, No,
I did it, but this is what little Chuck was
afraid of. And this isn't a joke. In order, sex Satan,
alcohol and drugs. Sex in Satan was my top five
And honestly, I even took notes and scribbled things out,
(26:46):
and that was about as accurate as I could get it. Huh.
And you overcame the first one with the second one
with the aid of the third one, but they popped
back in at four and five. Yeah, when you sobered up, Um,
so common fears, Josh industry, What did you say, dentistry
(27:08):
being or not? I thought that's what it's not becoming
a dentist, but going to the dentist flying Speaking in
public heights is a huge one. Yeah, we've gotten better
at the speaking in public thing, but we still get
very I still get terrified. Yeah, but we'll ever be
okay with that. No, not like super like Tony Robbins,
free and easy, because I imagine he's a cool customer
(27:29):
before he goes on stage. He's not throwing up. Although
you know, he might take beta blockers. Those are for
stage right now, Is that right? Yeah, it's one of
the you know how every drug on the planet says, well,
we've also discovered it helps with this. So beta blockers
evidently a lot of musicians use it. Well, we should
start doing beta blockers. Okay, Chuck. We were just talking
(27:51):
about universal fears, or what what a lot of people
think are universal fears, and there's some behind um, there's
some ideas behind universal fears, like snakes, spiders, that that
they are incredibly ancient, that are our fear of them
is probably pre human back when we were chimps who
(28:11):
were getting eaten by snakes, right, or who interacted with
spiders on a regular basis, and that's why we can
fear them without ever having had a bad experience with one,
or humans in the case of rats, because rats carried
disease that killed large populations of people. They think that's
why we're scared of rats today. That one is a
little hinky to me, because we've only been aware of
(28:33):
germ theory since like the nineteenth century. You know, I
don't really buy that. No. I think maybe rats, like
too many rats, like chew the eyeballs out of like
a sleeping friend. That's why I think we're afraid of rats,
not disease. I've never seen that happen in a movie. Um, really,
the balls out of a sleeping friend. No, I'm saying
(28:54):
like in real life and like life. You know, I'm
saying years and years ago. Okay, do you understand? Really? No,
I think I get it now. I think like way
back in the day, back when we were living in
caves or terrible shelter, would see the rats of the
eyeballs out of well, out of erg while he was sleeping,
and Tuck Tuck was like, whoa, I need to steer
(29:14):
clear of those rats. Okay. But there are some that
are not necessarily universal, that are actually culturally bound, right
or at least regionally bound, like um. A good example
in this article is, if you live on the coast,
you're probably going to have a greater fear of hurricanes
than somebody who lives in the Midwest, who's probably gonna
have a greater fear of tornadoes, especially lately, for goodness sake, Yes, God,
(29:39):
what is going on? It's tornadoes, man. Um. And then
there's some that are like you literally have to live
in this particular society to experience this fear kind of
not necessarily because I sometimes experienced this fear. Um, there's
one in Japan called taijien kiofusho kyofusio, right, which is
basically a cult cultural bound Japanese fear of inadvertently um irritating,
(30:06):
offending or offending somebody by being overly respectful or polite. Yeah,
so not only are you afraid of, you know, offending
somebody by being disrespectful or not polite enough, there's a
threshold where you could be overly polite and an offensive one,
and there's there's a fear of reaching that point. Right,
Or if you're the president, you might now have a
(30:28):
fear of giving a toast in England incorrectly, I have
a fear of seeing that again. That was mortifying, It
was it was so uncomfortable to watch. If you don't
know that. The President Obama recently went to England for
a state visit and apparently had a gaff or two
in his toast in front of a lot of people,
Like he raised his glass first, and the queen is
(30:49):
supposed to do that first, and she kept he had
his glass and did you see, she just kept looking
down a well. He was giving a toast during the
national anthem to her right, not realizing that everybody wasn't
being quiet, not because they were listening to his tasted,
because they were respectfully being quiet during the national anthem,
which he was trying to talk over that. The aftermath
was so awful because he looked around, he realized that
(31:12):
no one else's glasses raised, and he just quietly put
his glass. It was awful. So he also signed the
Queen's guest Book and dated it like May eleven, two eight,
So apparently Obahamas living in two thousand and eight. I
think he was nervous. Does all get out in Ireland?
He drank a pine of guinness at everybody. Well, that's
(31:32):
because that's the only rule Ireland has. You go to
England and they probably give him a dossier of like,
don't do this. He was probably chicken in his boots.
Well put, chuck, That's why we don't go in state
visits to England much so chuck. Yes um. We have
talked about fear, right, yes um. And we also talked about,
(31:53):
well we foreshadowed I think fear extinction, right um. John
Watson was planning on basically making a little all Albert's
fears go away through a process called fear extinction, which
is a type of conditioning. But it's like the reversal
of it. Yeah, we should point out the reason this
is important is because fear is okay in doses because
it is a survival tool. But it's not good to
(32:15):
live in constant fear. It's not good for your body
because it just reeks havoc on your internal systems because
of fight or flight is so intense exactly, it lowers
your immune system, you know, it raises the heart, blood pressure,
all that stuff. I think we talked about that. And
can you scare someone to death? Yes? Yeah, um, so
fear extinction. Well, any kind of fear conditioning is say,
(32:36):
hitting a claw hammer on a um on a piece
of metal behind a baby's head whenever he touches a
little white rat. Right. The opposite of that is having
the baby touch a little white rat and not making
that horrible sound. You can also say, um, condition rats
to fear a sound like just the tone like a
(32:57):
ding by giving them an electric shock in their change.
Every time that thing sounds, they're gonna come to fear.
That sound if you make that ding without delivering the shock. Eventually,
this fear memory, this conditioned fear, is going to be unlearned. Yes,
And uh, one thing that they learned out of that
that was pretty interesting is that they theorize that the
(33:18):
extinction memories form in the amygdala, but instead of staying there,
they're transferred to the medial prefinal cortex to be stored. So, uh,
it's still triggered in the amygdala, but that's where the
new learned non fear resides, right, they think that's what
they think that because it's the brain, it's all of
(33:38):
them to theory. The deal with the extinction too is exposure.
So one of the things that they'll do is, um,
let's say, if you're afraid of heights, they'll ench you
closer and closer to the edge of the building until
you realize, like, all right, nothing's happening in here. It's cool,
I'm not falling off. And then eventually, if you're exposed
to this enough, supposedly you can reverse some of these fears. Um.
(33:58):
That's that's general like behavioral psychology, just little by little,
because you're making smaller you're making memories every time I
didn't get bitten this time. That's weird, So maybe I'll
go a little further. I didn't get bitten again, and
then ultimately you're like, I'm probably not gonna get bitten,
so I don't need to be afraid. And that's when
you get bitten, you're done. Have you ever did you
(34:22):
used to watch the Bob Newhart show? Which old Yeah,
the not the old one, that the old old one,
the one from the seven Yes, um there was, Yes,
there's a great one called um flying the Unfriendly Skies
where he took like a group, one of his groups
that was afraid of flying a plane. And it's hilarious.
(34:44):
I was watching it today. Penny Marshall's the stewardess, said
young young just starting out. Penny Marshall, Bob Newhart equals
national treasure, agreed, I said it, So, Chuck, if the
cognitive behavioral treatment is not working, how got some drugs? Man? Yeah,
what's the deal with this? Well, there's a protein in
(35:05):
our brains called n M D A and methyl d spirate, right,
and it's in the a magdala and if you inhibit it,
so this is a double negative. If you inhibit it,
you also inhibit fear extinction. So science is reason if
(35:25):
you promote UM an m d A, right, then you
will also promote fear extinction. And they're finding that that's
actually the case. There's a tuberculosis drug and antibiotic that
promotes the production of the protein and m d A,
and they give it to people um and then give
them exposure therapy as well, right, because the whole deal
(35:46):
is they don't want to try and replace it with
a drug, but it just speeds up the classic conditioning
experiment and the the I guess a trial with rats
has proven this is possible. They condition them to to
fear a sound or a light or something with electric
shocks classical conditioning, and then said, well, here we're gonna
inject you with this tuberculous of antibiotic and the rats
(36:09):
that um uh, we're on the drug learned fear extinction
faster than the ones that we're doing it without the drug. Right.
Can we talk about one more experiment that we didn't cover,
And this is neat but itself this just sort of
hinky to me because you and we talked earlier about
the thrill of being afraid. That's why people go to
(36:31):
horror movies. That's why they get on roller coasters, and
people say that it's it can be akin to uh
sexual arousal. And this dude name Arthur Aaron did an
experiment which I thought was a little odd. He had
men walked across uh a suspension bridge, two different bridges,
one and these were four fifty ft long over a
(36:53):
two d and thirty ft gully. One bridge was very stable,
one bridge was not and very shaky, and he had
the men walk across this. At the other end of
the bridge, he had his very attractive female assistant waiting,
asked him some some red herring questions that didn't have
anything to do with the experiment, and then said, oh,
(37:14):
and here's my number if you have any questions. Apparently
three of the men, who of the thirty three men,
only two sorry called the woman afterward who walked across
the stable bridge. The guys that walked on the shaky bridge,
nine of the thirty three called her bam proven No.
I guess they just were like I can do anything.
(37:37):
What's your number? Or they're like, hey, I'm really turned
on because I almost just died. What's your number? What's
your number? Or I'm going to call you so choke?
What do you do if you have like if you
don't really want the drugs, you're you're not um debilitated.
And I should also say, the National Institutes of Health
say about nineteen million people in the United States alone,
(37:59):
so for from mental illnesses that involve irrational fear responses,
so everything from like a phobia, panic disorder, post traumatic
stress disorder, nineteen million people in the US alone. I
wan't I thought more than that, really. Yeah, but let's
say you're not one of these people where you're not
clinically afraid, but you still don't like heights or you know,
(38:21):
you can get on a plane, but you are not happy.
What are the eight tips? Well, one, Josh, is that
it doesn't matter why you're scared. So it's not like
to develop a big understanding of your fear helps you
overcome it actually delays that progress is what they say
as what prevention magazines, because number two says learn about
the thing you fear, right, I guess, not why you're scared,
(38:43):
but to learn more about it, like maybe injecting rationality
like this is how often plane actually goes down or
something like that. Yes, take baby steps, train yourself to
not be afraid hanging around someone who's not afraid of that. Like,
if you're afraid of heights, hanging around with me, because
I'm not afraid of heights. Talk about it, because sharing
(39:04):
out loud makes things better. Uh, play mind games with
yourself like that. And they used the classic example of
picturing a crowd naked. If you're speaking in front of him.
I've heard that you're that. That does not help, and
it may actually make things worse. I could see that,
and uh, don't look at the big picture, just look
at each little one step at a time, and uh,
(39:26):
seek help. If you have like really irrational fear, go
talk to someone. Seek help. Indeed, and seek this article.
You got anything else, So seek this article by typing
fear f e A R, not f E r E
into the search part. How stuff works dot com is
gonna bring up this article and some other cool stuff, right, yes, um,
(39:47):
And since I said that, Chuck, you know what time
it is. That's right, you know what the real is.
It's time for listener, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this
Hellos from Kazakhstan. Yeah, I just read an article in
the New Yorker about Kazakhstan and it's new capital. Um.
I believe it's called like Astana. Um. Yeah, Astana, the
(40:12):
the president of kazakh Stein like just has sunk billions
into creating a new capital in the middle of the
steps of the country. Good for him. And Kazakhstan is
the ninth largest country in the world by land mass.
It also shares the longest border in the world. Uh.
It shares it with the Sobviet. Wow, you're just recalling
(40:32):
all this too. It's very impressive. Uh. And I told
this guy that I would make fun of his accent
and read it as Borat and he said, I love it.
Nice and he literally titled it Hellos from Kazakhstan. Uh.
Your podcast is being played in Astana, Kazakhstan. That's the capital,
(40:53):
all right, so he lives. I discovered your podcast when
I once bought an iPod gizmo. I start did my
discovery of American culture when I won scholarship to study
my twelfth grade in American high school. That was an
awesome year for a guy who has never been to
McDonald's in his life and has never sat in nice
single seat student desks. I guess they said on benches
(41:17):
also include the traditional yellow school buses. I live with
great host family who further showed me culture. After graduating
high school, I want another scholarship to study at Canadian college.
As you have guessed. In four years in Canada, my
mentality got syncd with Northern American culture. Now I am
back in Kazakhstan and got job in I T Field.
(41:39):
I get stop that. Stop that, No, you gotta keep going,
you gotta finish. I am writing all of this because
every day on my way to work I listened to podcast,
and you guys always bring back good memories of USA
and Canada. For fifty minutes, I feel as if I
am in USA in Canada. I hope this feeling never
goes away. You also make me smile and laugh in uses,
(42:00):
and I look like idiot to other gray faces and
bus other what gray faces? I guess it just means
stinky commuters in kindict time. But the last I wish
everyone here understood English to listen to you guys, so
they should start their day with smile. Thanks for great
work and share of American culture is get and he
had been, which means regards and that is from Gaza
(42:24):
atte Gizatt he was thrilled that I would be making
fun of his exit. That is awesome. Thank you, Zat.
We are glad to keep you entertained and say hello
to boor At for us. Yeah who is actually British?
You know? Kay? Alright, just play and Freddie Mercury is
he really? That'll be great? Yeah wait our guy? No, no, no,
(42:45):
not not he's at Giza. We appreciate that. Um, if
you are afraid of something weird, we want to hear
about it. That includes you to Gazatte. We want to know. Um.
Send us an email at Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
(43:09):
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should Know
from House stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryant is
looking deeply into the eyes of Nicola Tesla right now.
(00:23):
For some reason, I never noticed that he literally is
staring at me the whole time. You know, I once
wrote an article for how stuff Works dot Com about
why the eyes and some paintings follow you. Oh really, Yeah, dude,
why didn't you tell me about that? I don't know.
We've never a podcast about it because it would literally
be like a five minute podcast. Well, maybe we can
bring it up, but yeah, your podcast. Maybe it's worth reading, though.
(00:47):
I think if you typed in eyes and painting or
something like that in the search bar how stuff works
dot Com, it would bring it up. I figured it
was because the eyes were cut out and there was
a psychopathic killer behind. It's a painting, that's to the
second paget. Also, while we're just doing pluggyness, right, why
don't you follow us on Twitter? It's a it's a
(01:09):
party over there, right. Our handle sometimes not what you
think right off the top of your head. But it
makes sense when you hear it s Y s K podcast, right,
And there's no like We're not like um Justin Bieber
or Lady Gaga. We don't say stupid stuff about being backstage.
We're actually a cool news aggregator, right, okay? Uh? And
(01:34):
then also we're on Facebook. We have a stuff you
should know Facebook page, Chuck and Chuck. You kill it
on that interacting with people coming out, shaking hands in
your robe and you know, with a little shrimp in
your mouth from being in the green room. You know, Hey,
how's it going, good to meet you? Thanks for coming out.
I can't imagine any were disgusting any coming at someone
with a robe and shrimp in my well. It happens
every day on Facebook, right, Um. And then I guess
(01:56):
now are you ready for the intro? Yes? Yeah, I
want I want you to go back with me to
uh alright, freshman in college. Baby, I'm a freshman in
high school. And um, I am in my room in
uh Kennesaw, Georgia, in my parents house, and it's nighttime
(02:17):
and I'm reading I don't remember what I'm reading, but
I'm like sitting on my bed reading. I'm actually laying
with my elbows up on my bed reading right. Um,
And I look over and notice that my closet door
is cracked slightly. This is abnormal. Usually my closet door
is shut tightly. Still. Uh yeah, even still, even still
(02:38):
to this day, I don't see any reason to leave
it open. It's funny how this little thing stick around.
So I remember making this little comment to myself, like, oh,
you know, that's that's weird. It's probably somebody in there, right,
But I go back to reading, and uh, I get this,
this annoying sensation. That's like getting my attention out of
the corner of my eye. And I look over and
(03:00):
now the door is correct by about three times more
than it was before. Well, I have tremendous amounts of sense.
So I throw my book down and start running towards
the door of my room. Right as I get to
my to the handle, my hands on the door knob
and starting to turn it, the closet door is thrown open.
And my dad, because I'm going I'm not kidding, this
(03:20):
is a true story. I went from a standing position
with my hand on the door knob to completely flat
on my back and like maybe a half of a motion.
It wasn't even one full motion, right, I was on
my back, screaming, staring at my dad, screaming in terror,
looking at him like you were looking at Nikola Tesla.
I see that it's my dad, but I'm so afraid
(03:42):
that I can't stop screaming. My mom has time to
make it up the stairs into my room and start
yelling at my dad, asking what did you do to Josh?
And I'm sitting there looking at them having this argument,
still screaming, going back and forth. Character. He is a character.
He looked so sad and so remorseful, realized. But I
(04:07):
I don't think I was wrong in in in noticing
a little glimmer of disappointment in his eye, like what
happened to you? Kid? Did you get to be such
a panny waist? So there is my fear story, Chuck,
that's my great fear story. We used to antagonize Eddie,
my friend Eddie in college. He was his roommates to
(04:28):
Eddy for years and we scare him all the time,
so awful, like coming home from the movie what was
the one with the author the James con Oh Misery misery,
came home from misery and like mate Bouten, literally unsto
screwed lightbulbs all over the apartment like hid in closets.
(04:50):
Eddie was smart enough to turn on the television for
light that we didn't count on that next time we
unplug the TV. It's tough to give him past that. Yeah,
it was always fun and he got to kick out
of it too, you could tell, which we'll get too later.
So yeah, we're gonna get to a lot in this one. Right,
This is how fear works. This is gonna be a
good one. I think. I think it already is. Well, okay,
thanks to your story. So, Chuck, I think we should
(05:12):
start out by basically defining fear. Webster's Dictionary defines fear
as such river in high school, and that was just
the way to start your You thought you were so smart. Yeah, uh,
it defines it. It doesn't, but we define it as
a chain reaction in the brain starts with a stimuli
can be many different things, and it ends up with
(05:33):
the fight or flight response in the end, exactly which
we know that you know about the fireflight response. Having
listened to this podcast faithfully since two thousand eight, yes, right. Um,
So we're not gonna go into too much detail about
the fireflight response because you already know this, but suffice
to say that fear is an autonomic response, which so
(05:55):
the autonomic nervous system. We've never mentioned this before. It's
really nervous. It is the nervous system that responds to stress,
and it's made up of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic
nervous systems. I don't think we have talked about that happened, no,
but it's like the umbrella nervous system that's like whoa,
okay and then calm down right right, And autonomic I
(06:16):
mean it almost means automatic in this case because it's
just triggered. We don't plan it. That just happens. That
pointer Sister's song could have been called autonomic. It's so interchangeable,
you know. Um so, yeah, well, there's not a lot
we can do, and we don't necessarily know what's going on.
Like um, analysis of the situation isn't necessarily a part
(06:39):
of being afraid. It's more like get out of there, right. Yeah,
we'll find yeah, we'll find that there's other ways that
that can happen right, coming soon as in a few minutes. Yeah,
So let's let's just go over what parts of the
brain are responsible for fear, right, Yeah, and this will
come up in in a in a minute here when
we describe how the paths go, there's just ended it.
(07:04):
But the thalamus um picks up on things that you
hear and see and smell um and in the way
of sensory data. Uh, sensory cortex interprets this. You got.
The hippocampus its stores the sea horse. Yes, that's right.
It's stores and receives conscious memories and starts to establish
like a context for what's going on. In this case,
(07:26):
fear amygdala plays a big part. It decodes the emotions
and determines the threat and stores old fear memories, fear
memories like if if something really bad happens to you
and you have to create like a real fear memory.
The amygdalas where that sits, okay, And then finally the
hypothalamus is where it always ends up no matter which
path it takes. People talk about those paths. The hypothalamus
(07:49):
is the on off switch for the fight or flight response.
It makes it's go time, and the only part of
your brain that can tell the hypothalamus whether it's go
time or whether go time is past. Is the right
It's the gate keeper to the autonomic nervous system. I'm
still just as thrilled about the brain as I was
when we first started studying this stuff. I know, I
think I'm more thrills. Yeah, so, Chuck, Josh. There is
(08:13):
a guy named Joseph Ledo. Have you heard of him?
He is a nervoscientist at n y U. And he
came up with two categories for our fear response. Yeah,
and they happened simultaneously. But there is what he's dubbed
a low road and a high road. And like I said,
(08:33):
both of them happened at the same time. Um. But
the low road is basically like the quick, nasty, dirty
response to fear, right, like, holy crap. Right, So um,
let's say there's a pretty good example in this article
by Julia Layton. Yeah, actually, both of the ones who
are recording today or Julia Layne's Yeah, way to go Layton,
She's good. Um. So, uh, let's say that you're sitting
(08:56):
at home, right and your underwear with a beer perched
on your stomach, and you're just watching some wrestling have
you been watching me have webcams set up in your house?
You do a lot of stuff because I encourage you
too without you know it. Okay, um uh, So you're
sitting at home as such, and um, all of a sudden,
(09:19):
your door just starts rattling, right, yeah, Okay, there's something
that's going to happen called the low road for your response,
and that is the sound and the sight of your
door rattling is the century data that suddenly goes into
what the thalamus, which sorts it and says, hey, um, amygdala,
(09:40):
I need your help. It's like forwarding the email. Yeah,
like there is a potential threat here and we need
to respond. And the amigellas says, you know what, you're right, thalamus,
I'm going to contact the hypocampus now, the hypothalamus right
and and basically get the fear fight or flight response going. Yeah,
(10:03):
just like just in case, let's go ahead and turn
it on. Right. So you are now your beer is
spilled all over the floor because you left up out
of your your easy chair. Okay. At the same time
this is going on, um, the high road response is
taking place, thankfully. Yes, So the high road responses, uh
it takes longer, but it gives you a much more
(10:23):
thoughtful analysis of what's going on. There's a couple of
extra stops along the way. Uh, that leads to reason
and context and that kind of thing. So this time
it goes to the century cortex first, and the century
cortex says, you know, what, this has happened before or no,
it's it says like there's more than one interpretation. Has
(10:45):
it happened before? And the hippocampus says, you know, and
remember that time in that big windstorm the tree fell
outside and he thought of the boogeman was coming to
get you, So remember that, right, Like, the hippocampus goes
and gets your memories to to analyze them for context.
Compared to this, the sensory cortex is saying, like, what
(11:06):
else is going on here right there? At exactly? Is
their patio furniture moving? Are their trees scraping on the window?
And all of a sudden you're like, okay, it is
wind right, that's right. But let's say that your um,
your your your brain, your sensory cortex said, um, no,
what I hear is a guy shouting like I'm coming
(11:27):
in right and your hippocampus is like, well, last time
that happened, like guy came in a ski mask and
I was hog type for three days before anybody around me. Right,
it was not the wind. So that leap up out
of the easy chair is your low road response and
standing there while your brain is interpreting the rest of
the data and then coming to the conclusion that yeah,
(11:47):
there's somebody coming through the door and then running out
your back door. That's the result of the high road response. Yeah.
Or if you determine or inside the brain that hey,
this is just a windstorm, then it sends the message
to the amygdala saying, hey, go tell the hypothalamus just
shut down the whole system. Not the whole system, because
you'd be dead, but shut down the fight or flight response.
(12:09):
It's just trees. And Emily is on the ceiling still
at this point because her high road is probably longer
than mine and the low road very very quick. Yes,
we heard gun shots one time in l A and
Emily literally it was like on the floor. I turned around,
like did you hear that? And she was on the
ground like in prone position. Wow. But you know I
(12:32):
grew up rough tumble, so I heard gun shots a
lot more than she did. Did you have a hard
scrapple youth, I did. I don't even know that, not
like the the streets of acron Rare, Emily grew the
tender streets of acron Ohio. Yeah, they were very tender,
all right, Josh. So you pointed out, which is very important,
that both of these things are happening at the same time.
(12:52):
And that is why, even if you realize very quickly
that there is no imminent danger, you're still going me
coming down from that fight or flight response for a
little bit, because your low road has also already been triggered, right,
and it all ends on hypothal in the hypothalmus either way. Yes,
are we done? I guess? So that was really rapid, man.
(13:15):
Now we're not done, because we gotta talk about emotions,
right and why we get scared. Well, yeah, there's very
little um argument about what emotions are for, and basically
they are motivators, right, yep, they are survival based motivators. Specifically, um,
the basic ones there's uh, let's see, anger, fear, surprised discussed, joy,
(13:39):
and sadness. Those are the six basic emotions that an
anthropologist named Paul Ekman identified in the nineteen seventies. Right, yeah,
you see that's sick. Um, and uh, you know we're
talking about fear right now, but you could make the
this is the this is the case for all of
at least those basic, if not all, the emotions that
(14:00):
a human can experience. Is that their motivators. They're saying
there's something in going on with you, specifically right now
in your environment or in your life, and a kind
of a medicine or both. Right yeah, Um, with fear,
it's normally something's in your environment. Yeah, and it's clearly
a motivator to survive. Right. So um, let's say that, Um,
(14:25):
you're you're a caveman. Okay, So I'm back on the
couch with my bigger and um, you're sitting there, Uh
you see a snake. You just don't don't have a
very good feeling about it, so you don't go up
and touch it. But your friend Erg sitting next to you,
is like, well what is this? And Erg gets bit
(14:45):
and dies a horrible nasty death right in front of
your eyes. What happened to tuktok? Know you're tuktok Okay,
so um, you tuktok have just formed possibly the fear memory, uh,
in response to snakes. You are doing a very crude
(15:06):
interpretation of natural selection and evolution. You are going to
be able to go mate, and mayhaps that fear memory
will somehow epigenetically be passed on to your offspring and
then it's a trait eventually. Yes, So, um, fear is
a survival based motivator, right, Yeah, And Caveman is an
(15:28):
apt description because if you feared the right things back
in the day, like snakes and tigers and lightning, then
you had a good chance of surviving and procreating, and
all of a sudden you had a stronger, uh, smarter,
wiser population exactly. But all those is going on, you know,
long long, long ago, and a lot of people argue
(15:49):
long before we were humans, but you know, back when
we were still prey to snakes like primates, that's still
stuck around and that's probably where they first started. But um,
we didn't have any idea that this was evolution at work.
And it wasn't until like the late nineteenth century that
Darwin really kind of got the attention of the world
(16:11):
and said, hey, these are inherent traits that are passed
down like fear is not something that's necessarily learned. It's
something we have instinctively. And he conducted this pretty cool
little experiment that he wrote about in um his book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which
is published in eighteen seventy two, And he went to
the zoo right well, yeah, he was um specifically there.
(16:33):
The debate at the time was about the face of
fear the Edward monk, like, holy crap, face that everyone
gets when they're scared. You took it as being scared.
I thought that was a scream of joy, the face
of fear, Yeah, our monk. Oh really, I thought he
was like I just got the best deal on this muffler.
It looked more to me like home alone. Oh my gosh.
(16:55):
Oh no, that was joy. Though at the time he
was glad his parents were gone. Right, No, no no, he was.
He couldn't believe it. That was I think surprised, and
then later joy and then later sadness. Yeah, when he
learned what we all know eventually, the family is important,
and don't fear the creepy old man in your neighborhood.
Actually you probably should, probably should. I think Chris Colemus
did a great disservice to children by by making that
(17:18):
a moral Alright, So yeah, I always interpreted monks because
it was called the scream as as terror, regardless that
face we all make when we're scared, you know, out
of our pants. Uh. He went and Darwin went and
stood in front of a clear uh PLEXI I guess
it was quite glass at the time, I would think
(17:39):
it was, and had a puff adder jump, you know,
leaped towards his face. Even though he knew he was protected,
he still reacted with that fear face and jumped back.
And he said basically that, uh, my will and reason
were powerless against the imagination of danger, even though he's
never experienced it. So like I've never been bitten by
(17:59):
a snake, but or actually they said that people that
have never even Yeah, So he came to this conclusion
that that fear and you know, likely all of our
basic emotions are very much passed down through the generations, right,
And uh, he came to that conclusion because he couldn't
(18:20):
control himself when the snake, which you'd never been bitten by,
um lunged at the glass which was safely in between them.
He still couldn't control it. So he concluded, Yeah, there's
there's a lot more going onto this than you know.
This is something I've learned because why would I be
afraid of a snake? And I know rationally that there's
glass there, So that this stuff is so ancient. Are
(18:44):
modern trappings of civilization e g. A glass and a
zoo can't subdue it? Yeah? Yeah, the same at baseball
games when Pete they fouled the ball back and they know,
you know, there's a screen right in front of you,
and you will never get hit by a baseball, but
people still jump back and that bay maybe more that
may be less fear and more just an autonomic reaction
(19:06):
to something coming at you. That was Darwin's point. Really, Yeah,
it's the same thing. Yeah, because if we didn't experience fear,
like a baseball coming out would be like and then boom. Yeah,
same same with anything that we we moved to get
away from. You always feel like a goober too at
the game when that happens. Well, that's a that's a
(19:26):
higher um emotion that supposedly are specific to humans and
a couple of other higher primates, which is embarrassment that
only exists in relation to other people. Right, I don't
think I said the word goober in like a decade.
It's a good one, just flew out of my mouth.
I love goober's. I've said, can I have another goober?
But what was that? The peanut and chopped Yeah? Um,
(19:49):
so Chuck Darwin basically said, I'm right, you're wrong, you're idiots.
Um and uh. Fear is now seen as a a
basic emotional response, that's an inherited one. Yeah. And it's
the same as it was in the caveman days, except
it's not lines and tigers now it's people breaking into
your house, home invasion, terrorist attack. Well put um. And
(20:12):
then there's another point that Darwin made. I don't know
if he hammered at home, but um, we can anticipate things, right,
Like we don't have to see a snake by erg
to be afraid of a specific snake, right or have
it experienced right or um? And it doesn't go away
(20:34):
with each snake, like each new snake doesn't necessarily not
represent a new threat. Snakes in general do right. Um.
And that's because we can anticipate things right. That's another
survival mode that um, that fear triggers or that I
guess the centered around fear. We can anticipate being afraid,
and apparently studies have shown that we can become physiologically
(20:58):
and psychologically just does afraid when we anticipate being afraid
of something, then when we're actually confronted with that thing
we're afraid of. Yeah, well, which is like a fear
of flying would be a perfect example of that, Yes,
it would. You can be just as scared, probably as
if you have actually been in a plane crash, if
you have a really really intense phobia flying, dude, I
can tell you that even if you've ever been on
(21:20):
a even a remotely scary flight, you can very much
be afraid anticipatoryally of a plane crash. It's very scary.
You've gotten pretty good though, right, dude. I am great.
I slept through the last takeoff I was on. Really
I could not believe it. You mean, was like, who
are you checking your bolts? Yeah? Yeah, and nothing. I
(21:42):
was on no scotch, no pills, no nothing. You weren't
on scotch, no scotch. Well that's called fear extinction, and
we'll get to that. Yeah, more foreshadowing other precursor. That
was very anticipatory. So speaking of conditioning, which we were not.
Let's talk about a very cruel experiment in the night
twenties by Mr John Watson Little Albert. Little Albert was
(22:04):
an eleven month old baby. I think they call Albert
a toddler. They call him an infant, and that's a
baby starting to toddle, just starting the title, So a
little Albert. They wanted to teach Albert fear of white rats.
The problem was, I guess it wouldn't have problem is
probably pretty good for the sake of the experiment, was
that he loved white rats, and when the white rats
(22:26):
would come around, little Albert would even reach for them,
and guests try to pet them, and until they started
playing this loud booming noise. No you know what they did.
They took a claw hammer and a piece of metal
and burned it right behind his head every time he
went to go. That was the loud booming noise. So uh,
it didn't take long before Albert was crying and moving
(22:47):
away from the white rats as expected. And not just
white rats, chuck rabbits, really for coats, cotton balls. They
showed that fear isn't just think that we in hear it.
It can be conditioned, and little Albert became sick fried Fishbocker.
Here's the worst part. You ready for it. That's not true,
(23:09):
you're ready. Well, no one knows who little Albert is. Well,
he wasn't sick freed Fishbocker. Well you so, John Watson
UM was planning on reversing this fear conditioning, but was
caught having an affair with an assistant and was fired
before he could so exactly, and Um Watson went on
to UM get into the advertising game, and uh it
(23:33):
was successful and actually married I think the lady he
was having an affair with UM, but burned all of
his notes and I think before he died in so
no one to this day has any idea who what
when was this the nineteen twenties, so little Albert would
be old or dead, would be like probably dead, probably
died of fright at a young age. And that horrible.
(23:53):
That was pretty horrible. But out of this horrible old
time experiment, which if you're interested, I like top five
horrific psychological experiments for the blogs, this is one of them. Um.
The what came out of it was an understanding that
fear is conditioned, right, and if you can condition somebody.
(24:14):
If you can teach somebody to fear, you can teach
people to unfear. Yeah. Right, But before we get to that,
chuck more precursors. I think we should, um, I think
we should talk about some of the most common fears. Yeah,
I didn't realize that phobia is there are only three
main types, and I guess it's sort of a loose
A lot of them fall under these umbrellas, So that
(24:36):
must be the deal. Because a gooraphobia fear of places
where escape might not be be easy or help may
not be available. Oh, that's like a fear of big
open places. Yeah, but I think in a broader sense
it's just fear of of I may not be able
to get help in case I need it. You know.
One of the characteristics of agoraphobia in some cases is
(24:56):
like being afraid. You're like if you're out on the beach,
being afraid you won't have anything to grab onto and
just flying off the earth. Really yeah, yeah, like you
can't go into big open spaces. It's like the opposite
of claustrophobia. Joan Cusack on that show that awesome Showtime
show has a goora phobia. You can't lead the house.
And it's like really kind of heartbreaking, maybe because it's
(25:18):
Joan Cusack, you know, and you have like you want
good things for her, you want good things for the
whole Cusack family. Yeah, that's true. Uh. Social phobias obviously
have anything to do with people. And then specific phobias
is the third category, which is a bit of a
cop out because that's like everything else that you're afraid of,
including you're ready, phobophobia, fear a phobias, fear of fear,
(25:41):
fear of fear, that's everybody. No, this is like debilitating
phobia that you don't like that you're afraid of becoming
afraid at some point. So what do you just set
your life up very safely, like don't watch horror movies,
don't Okay, well should we read this gallop pole? Yeah,
and I couldn't find a more recent one. No, this
(26:02):
is probably fairly accurate. Still though with two thousand five
and sort of sad they pulled teenagers in the United
States and their top ten things they were afraid of
terrorist attacks was number one. I wonder if that's still
the case. I bet it's not. Maybe Spider's death failure,
war heights, crime, being alone in the future, and nuclear war.
(26:25):
And I made my own top five as a teenager,
as a Baptist teenager, like back then, you did, No,
I did it, but this is what little Chuck was
afraid of. And this isn't a joke. In order, sex Satan,
alcohol and drugs. Sex in Satan was my top five
And honestly, I even took notes and scribbled things out,
(26:46):
and that was about as accurate as I could get it. Huh.
And you overcame the first one with the second one
with the aid of the third one, but they popped
back in at four and five. Yeah, when you sobered up, Um,
so common fears, Josh industry, What did you say, dentistry
(27:08):
being or not? I thought that's what it's not becoming
a dentist, but going to the dentist flying Speaking in
public heights is a huge one. Yeah, we've gotten better
at the speaking in public thing, but we still get
very I still get terrified. Yeah, but we'll ever be
okay with that. No, not like super like Tony Robbins,
free and easy, because I imagine he's a cool customer
(27:29):
before he goes on stage. He's not throwing up. Although
you know, he might take beta blockers. Those are for
stage right now, Is that right? Yeah, it's one of
the you know how every drug on the planet says, well,
we've also discovered it helps with this. So beta blockers
evidently a lot of musicians use it. Well, we should
start doing beta blockers. Okay, Chuck. We were just talking
(27:51):
about universal fears, or what what a lot of people
think are universal fears, and there's some behind um, there's
some ideas behind universal fears, like snakes, spiders, that that
they are incredibly ancient, that are our fear of them
is probably pre human back when we were chimps who
(28:11):
were getting eaten by snakes, right, or who interacted with
spiders on a regular basis, and that's why we can
fear them without ever having had a bad experience with one,
or humans in the case of rats, because rats carried
disease that killed large populations of people. They think that's
why we're scared of rats today. That one is a
little hinky to me, because we've only been aware of
(28:33):
germ theory since like the nineteenth century. You know, I
don't really buy that. No. I think maybe rats, like
too many rats, like chew the eyeballs out of like
a sleeping friend. That's why I think we're afraid of rats,
not disease. I've never seen that happen in a movie. Um, really,
the balls out of a sleeping friend. No, I'm saying
(28:54):
like in real life and like life. You know, I'm
saying years and years ago. Okay, do you understand? Really? No,
I think I get it now. I think like way
back in the day, back when we were living in
caves or terrible shelter, would see the rats of the
eyeballs out of well, out of erg while he was sleeping,
and Tuck Tuck was like, whoa, I need to steer
(29:14):
clear of those rats. Okay. But there are some that
are not necessarily universal, that are actually culturally bound, right
or at least regionally bound, like um. A good example
in this article is, if you live on the coast,
you're probably going to have a greater fear of hurricanes
than somebody who lives in the Midwest, who's probably gonna
have a greater fear of tornadoes, especially lately, for goodness sake, Yes, God,
(29:39):
what is going on? It's tornadoes, man. Um. And then
there's some that are like you literally have to live
in this particular society to experience this fear kind of
not necessarily because I sometimes experienced this fear. Um, there's
one in Japan called taijien kiofusho kyofusio, right, which is
basically a cult cultural bound Japanese fear of inadvertently um irritating,
(30:06):
offending or offending somebody by being overly respectful or polite. Yeah,
so not only are you afraid of, you know, offending
somebody by being disrespectful or not polite enough, there's a
threshold where you could be overly polite and an offensive one,
and there's there's a fear of reaching that point. Right,
Or if you're the president, you might now have a
(30:28):
fear of giving a toast in England incorrectly, I have
a fear of seeing that again. That was mortifying, It
was it was so uncomfortable to watch. If you don't
know that. The President Obama recently went to England for
a state visit and apparently had a gaff or two
in his toast in front of a lot of people,
Like he raised his glass first, and the queen is
(30:49):
supposed to do that first, and she kept he had
his glass and did you see, she just kept looking
down a well. He was giving a toast during the
national anthem to her right, not realizing that everybody wasn't
being quiet, not because they were listening to his tasted,
because they were respectfully being quiet during the national anthem,
which he was trying to talk over that. The aftermath
was so awful because he looked around, he realized that
(31:12):
no one else's glasses raised, and he just quietly put
his glass. It was awful. So he also signed the
Queen's guest Book and dated it like May eleven, two eight,
So apparently Obahamas living in two thousand and eight. I
think he was nervous. Does all get out in Ireland?
He drank a pine of guinness at everybody. Well, that's
(31:32):
because that's the only rule Ireland has. You go to
England and they probably give him a dossier of like,
don't do this. He was probably chicken in his boots.
Well put, chuck, That's why we don't go in state
visits to England much so chuck. Yes um. We have
talked about fear, right, yes um. And we also talked about,
(31:53):
well we foreshadowed I think fear extinction, right um. John
Watson was planning on basically making a little all Albert's
fears go away through a process called fear extinction, which
is a type of conditioning. But it's like the reversal
of it. Yeah, we should point out the reason this
is important is because fear is okay in doses because
it is a survival tool. But it's not good to
(32:15):
live in constant fear. It's not good for your body
because it just reeks havoc on your internal systems because
of fight or flight is so intense exactly, it lowers
your immune system, you know, it raises the heart, blood pressure,
all that stuff. I think we talked about that. And
can you scare someone to death? Yes? Yeah, um, so
fear extinction. Well, any kind of fear conditioning is say,
(32:36):
hitting a claw hammer on a um on a piece
of metal behind a baby's head whenever he touches a
little white rat. Right. The opposite of that is having
the baby touch a little white rat and not making
that horrible sound. You can also say, um, condition rats
to fear a sound like just the tone like a
(32:57):
ding by giving them an electric shock in their change.
Every time that thing sounds, they're gonna come to fear.
That sound if you make that ding without delivering the shock. Eventually,
this fear memory, this conditioned fear, is going to be unlearned. Yes,
And uh, one thing that they learned out of that
that was pretty interesting is that they theorize that the
(33:18):
extinction memories form in the amygdala, but instead of staying there,
they're transferred to the medial prefinal cortex to be stored. So, uh,
it's still triggered in the amygdala, but that's where the
new learned non fear resides, right, they think that's what
they think that because it's the brain, it's all of
(33:38):
them to theory. The deal with the extinction too is exposure.
So one of the things that they'll do is, um,
let's say, if you're afraid of heights, they'll ench you
closer and closer to the edge of the building until
you realize, like, all right, nothing's happening in here. It's cool,
I'm not falling off. And then eventually, if you're exposed
to this enough, supposedly you can reverse some of these fears. Um.
(33:58):
That's that's general like behavioral psychology, just little by little,
because you're making smaller you're making memories every time I
didn't get bitten this time. That's weird, So maybe I'll
go a little further. I didn't get bitten again, and
then ultimately you're like, I'm probably not gonna get bitten,
so I don't need to be afraid. And that's when
you get bitten, you're done. Have you ever did you
(34:22):
used to watch the Bob Newhart show? Which old Yeah,
the not the old one, that the old old one,
the one from the seven Yes, um there was, Yes,
there's a great one called um flying the Unfriendly Skies
where he took like a group, one of his groups
that was afraid of flying a plane. And it's hilarious.
(34:44):
I was watching it today. Penny Marshall's the stewardess, said
young young just starting out. Penny Marshall, Bob Newhart equals
national treasure, agreed, I said it, So, Chuck, if the
cognitive behavioral treatment is not working, how got some drugs? Man? Yeah,
what's the deal with this? Well, there's a protein in
(35:05):
our brains called n M D A and methyl d spirate, right,
and it's in the a magdala and if you inhibit it,
so this is a double negative. If you inhibit it,
you also inhibit fear extinction. So science is reason if
(35:25):
you promote UM an m d A, right, then you
will also promote fear extinction. And they're finding that that's
actually the case. There's a tuberculosis drug and antibiotic that
promotes the production of the protein and m d A,
and they give it to people um and then give
them exposure therapy as well, right, because the whole deal
(35:46):
is they don't want to try and replace it with
a drug, but it just speeds up the classic conditioning
experiment and the the I guess a trial with rats
has proven this is possible. They condition them to to
fear a sound or a light or something with electric
shocks classical conditioning, and then said, well, here we're gonna
inject you with this tuberculous of antibiotic and the rats
(36:09):
that um uh, we're on the drug learned fear extinction
faster than the ones that we're doing it without the drug. Right.
Can we talk about one more experiment that we didn't cover,
And this is neat but itself this just sort of
hinky to me because you and we talked earlier about
the thrill of being afraid. That's why people go to
(36:31):
horror movies. That's why they get on roller coasters, and
people say that it's it can be akin to uh
sexual arousal. And this dude name Arthur Aaron did an
experiment which I thought was a little odd. He had
men walked across uh a suspension bridge, two different bridges,
one and these were four fifty ft long over a
(36:53):
two d and thirty ft gully. One bridge was very stable,
one bridge was not and very shaky, and he had
the men walk across this. At the other end of
the bridge, he had his very attractive female assistant waiting,
asked him some some red herring questions that didn't have
anything to do with the experiment, and then said, oh,
(37:14):
and here's my number if you have any questions. Apparently
three of the men, who of the thirty three men,
only two sorry called the woman afterward who walked across
the stable bridge. The guys that walked on the shaky bridge,
nine of the thirty three called her bam proven No.
I guess they just were like I can do anything.
(37:37):
What's your number? Or they're like, hey, I'm really turned
on because I almost just died. What's your number? What's
your number? Or I'm going to call you so choke?
What do you do if you have like if you
don't really want the drugs, you're you're not um debilitated.
And I should also say, the National Institutes of Health
say about nineteen million people in the United States alone,
(37:59):
so for from mental illnesses that involve irrational fear responses,
so everything from like a phobia, panic disorder, post traumatic
stress disorder, nineteen million people in the US alone. I
wan't I thought more than that, really. Yeah, but let's
say you're not one of these people where you're not
clinically afraid, but you still don't like heights or you know,
(38:21):
you can get on a plane, but you are not happy.
What are the eight tips? Well, one, Josh, is that
it doesn't matter why you're scared. So it's not like
to develop a big understanding of your fear helps you
overcome it actually delays that progress is what they say
as what prevention magazines, because number two says learn about
the thing you fear, right, I guess, not why you're scared,
(38:43):
but to learn more about it, like maybe injecting rationality
like this is how often plane actually goes down or
something like that. Yes, take baby steps, train yourself to
not be afraid hanging around someone who's not afraid of that. Like,
if you're afraid of heights, hanging around with me, because
I'm not afraid of heights. Talk about it, because sharing
(39:04):
out loud makes things better. Uh, play mind games with
yourself like that. And they used the classic example of
picturing a crowd naked. If you're speaking in front of him.
I've heard that you're that. That does not help, and
it may actually make things worse. I could see that,
and uh, don't look at the big picture, just look
at each little one step at a time, and uh,
(39:26):
seek help. If you have like really irrational fear, go
talk to someone. Seek help. Indeed, and seek this article.
You got anything else, So seek this article by typing
fear f e A R, not f E r E
into the search part. How stuff works dot com is
gonna bring up this article and some other cool stuff, right, yes, um,
(39:47):
And since I said that, Chuck, you know what time
it is. That's right, you know what the real is.
It's time for listener, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this
Hellos from Kazakhstan. Yeah, I just read an article in
the New Yorker about Kazakhstan and it's new capital. Um.
I believe it's called like Astana. Um. Yeah, Astana, the
(40:12):
the president of kazakh Stein like just has sunk billions
into creating a new capital in the middle of the
steps of the country. Good for him. And Kazakhstan is
the ninth largest country in the world by land mass.
It also shares the longest border in the world. Uh.
It shares it with the Sobviet. Wow, you're just recalling
(40:32):
all this too. It's very impressive. Uh. And I told
this guy that I would make fun of his accent
and read it as Borat and he said, I love it.
Nice and he literally titled it Hellos from Kazakhstan. Uh.
Your podcast is being played in Astana, Kazakhstan. That's the capital,
(40:53):
all right, so he lives. I discovered your podcast when
I once bought an iPod gizmo. I start did my
discovery of American culture when I won scholarship to study
my twelfth grade in American high school. That was an
awesome year for a guy who has never been to
McDonald's in his life and has never sat in nice
single seat student desks. I guess they said on benches
(41:17):
also include the traditional yellow school buses. I live with
great host family who further showed me culture. After graduating
high school, I want another scholarship to study at Canadian college.
As you have guessed. In four years in Canada, my
mentality got syncd with Northern American culture. Now I am
back in Kazakhstan and got job in I T Field.
(41:39):
I get stop that. Stop that, No, you gotta keep going,
you gotta finish. I am writing all of this because
every day on my way to work I listened to podcast,
and you guys always bring back good memories of USA
and Canada. For fifty minutes, I feel as if I
am in USA in Canada. I hope this feeling never
goes away. You also make me smile and laugh in uses,
(42:00):
and I look like idiot to other gray faces and
bus other what gray faces? I guess it just means
stinky commuters in kindict time. But the last I wish
everyone here understood English to listen to you guys, so
they should start their day with smile. Thanks for great
work and share of American culture is get and he
had been, which means regards and that is from Gaza
(42:24):
atte Gizatt he was thrilled that I would be making
fun of his exit. That is awesome. Thank you, Zat.
We are glad to keep you entertained and say hello
to boor At for us. Yeah who is actually British?
You know? Kay? Alright, just play and Freddie Mercury is
he really? That'll be great? Yeah wait our guy? No, no, no,
(42:45):
not not he's at Giza. We appreciate that. Um, if
you are afraid of something weird, we want to hear
about it. That includes you to Gazatte. We want to know. Um.
Send us an email at Stuff Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
(43:09):
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
of tomorrow, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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