I was recently scared out of my skin looking at my shower curtain- not a Psycho, just a spider the size of my thumbnail ambling innocently along. The thought of that ocular octet trained on me…..my skin still crawls. What makes us scared and why does reason head out for second breakfast while we are?
Joseph E. LeDoux of New York University discussed this tonight at Brainwave , a series bringing art and science together in a Himalayan art museum (meditation and skull cup discussions included in admission). A basic approximation is that the tiny amygdala gets to govern a reaction to fear before you even know you’re having it, and there’s little your pre-frontal cortex can do to talk it back down. LeDoux pointed to a number of interesting sounding studies on fear and fear conditioning, including the idea that we very easily learn to fear certain thngs (spiders, snakes…). I’d be really interested in the input of neuroscientists as to why and how (can you recommend some papers/reviews? this is outside of my usual strolling ground).
But I guess one of the most interesting parts of this to me, is the idea that the response to such stimuli is adaptive and in some way engrained. My experience is that the effectiveness of the physiological response is highly variable.
Good amygdala day:
Hiking in a Costa Rican rainforest, a snake reared up at me, and freezing in fear helped (basically I rapidly stopped threatening it).
“Go to the back of the class” amygdala performances:
1) I froze and my legs turned to unusable jelly leaving me teetering at the edge of a Canadian precipice (Yoho park)- the fall over the edge would’ve hurt a tiny bit (fatally).
2) Eagle-like creature attacked me and I froze, ending up looking like an great target. It carried on swooping at me, claws bared.
3) In the face of “shower spider” the whole reaction was pointless and made me late for work.
Silly limbic system- why won’t you listen to sense now and again?
That’s not a spider.
that’s a spider.
Gah. I showed your huntsman photo to the kids and they were duly impressed.
How in the heck did you get it out of the living room? With a bear trap or something?
Sarbjit – spiders don’t bother me but I really am not fond of centipedes. I wonder, though, if the responses to modern (i.e., non-‘ingrained’) threats follows a physiologically similar route? I confess I don’t know anything about this, and haven’t looked into it, but I wonder if the same control and feedback loops are used in responding to, say, someone pointing a gun in your general direction?
Not that I really want to find out first hand, mind.
Jeez louise- I did not need to see that before my coffee! You are mean person (but nice use of quote from Mr. Dundee)! Yes, what happened next? How’d you get rid of that monster?
Richard- I’m wondering the same question. What LeDoux said was under fear conditioning experiments (which seem at a level artificial), people tend to learn to react to spiders, snakes much faster- I’d bet centipedes fall into the same category, combining attributes of spideriness and snakiness into one beautiful slimy package. What was also interesting was he said it happens extremely fast compared to other learning- no training required.
I’m with you on that Richard. Centipedes and millipedes really make me feel unwell. I feel more anxious about millipedes – I think it’s because I know many of them are venomous.
I was going to say maybe it’s possible to train you amygdala, as I don’t fear spiders (well, the ones in New York) because I rationalize that they eat other bugs I don’t like.
Then… I say Richard’s picture. That spider is terrifying! Though, it could potentially eat cockroaches, which would be nice.
I believe that trying to diminish fear memory (the emotional part of the memory, not the actual memory) and thus subsequent fear reaction was what they were trying to do in this study , on healthy students being exposed to spider pictures/ shocks, but correct me if I’m wrong).
I found myself looking fixedly at my keyboard as I scrolled past Richard’s photo, and now Caryn’s gone and bought up cockroaches giving me more heebie-jeebies. Therefore…..Richard W. and Frank, have you ever felt the gentle but slightly spiky caress of the myriad legs of a centipede/millipede as it slowly but purposefully crawls up your arm?
My own Room 101 would be full of maggots.
shudders.
I should have photographed some cockroaches, shouldn’t I?
I seem to remember hiring a crane to remove the spider.
I’ve heard that both dogs and cats can kill huntsman spiders without risk of serious consequences from a bite. Not sure whether it’s true.
Of all the poisonous or toxic critters in Texas,
George W Bush and Rick Perryscorpions are the only ones that really give me the heebie-jeebies. When you turn on the lights, scorpions run around in a crazed psychotic manner, curling and waving the stinger tail. Brrrrr. Gotta find a large, heavy object with a flat surface.Some might find the Schmidt Sting Pain Index amusing.
Huntsman spiders have a nasty bite, but aren’t venomous to humans. So we can let them live. Funnelwebs, on the other hand, have incredibly human-toxic venom but dogs and cats are immune to them. So they must die.
Daddylonglegs, apparently, are also seriously venomous to humans, but can’t actually pierce our skin.
I don’t think Australia is a place for anyone with wildlife phobias such as Ophidiophobia or Arachnophobia. Those small Red-backed spiders that hide out in the “dunny” particularly get my amygdala going.
But redbacks are cute!
A friend of mine went camping in Australia recently, and when she woke up and rolled up her sleeping bag, she found out that she had been sleeping on top of a scorpion all night.
I almost had the same experience in Italy once. I’m kind of blind without my glasses, and mumbled to my friend: “There’s a leaf on top of the tent”. She calmly (almost deadpan) replied: “That’s not a leaf, that’s a scorpion. And it’s on the inside.” Well, I was on the OUTSIDE of the tent within seconds, screaming, and panicked until someone removed it.
I am also scared of: spiders (see my screaming on Richard’s spider’s Flickr page, if you dare), big moths (but not butterflies), wasps (but not bees so much), huge dragonflies, and other flying insects that are bigger than a bumblebee (which is not scary).
How’s your sister, Eva?
She took an extreme closeup fuzzy picture of a dead (half) cockroach on the first day in her new place, got sun burned on a 10-minute coffee break, and is still waiting to meet a huge spider.
This was a very timely post – had any of you come across this already? Ah, here’s the real thing.
“If emotional memory could be weakened or even erased, then we might be able to eliminate the root of many psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” It also sounds like the basis of a fantastic, Philip Dick-like novel.
Yes Heather I did- it’s the paper I was refering Caryn to above and it has been on my mind recently, but I know that some elements of the media discussed this as “mind control manchurian candidate” stuff, when in fact it’s more like trying to blunt the emotional part of a memory as I understand it.
Eva- is your sister in Australia? You should let her know that while the dunny sounds like a lovely picnic spot, there be beasts and redbacks there.
Kristi, One scorpion= a curious new friend. A horde of scorpions= run for the hills….quantity matters for scariness here, same is true for maggots.
And yes, sorry, an exaggerated version would work for Philip K. Dick!
Re. that paper, Christie blogged about this last month too, complaining about the press coverage.
“quantity matters for scariness”
Not for bot flies. One is enough.
Re the bot fly larva: I am simultaneously impressed and deeply disgusted.
One scorpion is enough, especially if it’s lurking in your riding trousers, or skittering across your pillow, or being flung across the room by the ceiling fan, after dropping out of a vent.
yea, huge Australian spiders, cockroaches and over-sized earwigs were very strong incentives for me to move out of a ground floor unit and into the top floor of a 6-storey bldg. whatever happened to incy wincy spiders on this continent?
scorpions could be worse though :S
they’re delicacies in some places though, deep fried scorpions are um, traditional in Beijing.
Lawks-a-mercy Cath, I admit Bob the bot fly is a solo menace! But I’m more concerned about a scorpion being flung randomly across the room by a ceiling fan (hopefully into a deep fat fryer, especially one of those juicy fat looking scorpions).
I’m actually not kidding- I have to literally avert my eyes or screw them up tight closed as I scroll past Richard G’s comment.
On a totally unrelated note, it looks like we were wrong about the jar!
Ack, Sarbjit, that will teach me to read the comments more closely. Although I must admit that like you, I was scrolling quickly past the first photo. You know, for the last couple of days, I thought that thing was a sculpture! I had seen these last summer at the Morton Arboretum in Chicago, and just assumed… (shudder).
And yet, IRL, I can control spider fear and even get the bigger ones out of the house without too much panic or squashing them. Richard’s spider is almost attractive. My thing is hornets. All buzzy things, but I can slap down that amygdala, until they get to be 5 cm long like the ones I saw preying on bumblebees in our pear tree as a kid. I literally run away screaming, and could not look at the online pictures.
Then again, I’ve never had to confront a scorpion yet.
@Frank – millipedes don’t bother me at all, but I’m used to the benign and friendly ones I see at the cottage, which are rather cute and don’t bite. Nor do they move very fast.
@Sarbjit – I have been tickled by a centipede, yes. I’ve also woken up in the morning and found the crushed remains of one where I’d obviously rolled over on it during the night. Ick.
Let’s not even talk about earwigs. Double ick.
@RPG – you have to be careful with the term “Daddy Long-Legs”, which seems to mean different things to different people. Some people use it to mean flying things like Craneflies, others to mean the Harvestman. I go with the latter, although certain UK-derived relatives of mine prefer the former.
@Heather – do you like flies? I found a rather nice Tiger Bee Fly in my backyard a summer or two ago, which looks like a rather attractive house fly, but about 5 times the size (bigger than a horsefly). Similar to your hornet, it’s just unreasonably large, although completely harmless unless you’re a caterpillar.
Ah, here’s my photo of it from its page on bugguide.net.
Richard- your millipede photos are really cool as is the tiger bee fly (but what’s Jonas doing to that earwig ?). I think earwigs have that pinchy/ bitey factor. I also thought quantity was a fear factor, but size definitely is too (I’ve only met one scorpion and it was only a couple of centimeters long). I’ve some idea why these things cause fear, but I’m a bit floored about where other fears come from- I know someone who would rather wrestle a scorpion and jump into a Tiger Bee Fly nest than give a talk.
I held this tarantula on my hand a couple of years ago. There was some suppression of something going on, is all I can say.
I have to agree that size matters for terrestrial bugs. Strangely, I was spooked quite a bit by a ‘nightcrawler’ (I learned this word for large earthworms in the US…) I came across in our garden in Colorado once – although earthworms are, of course, every gardeners friend, that unusually big specimen flew over the fence.
Did someone pay you huge wads of cash to hold the Tarantula or were you promised eternal life? I’m imagining your neighbor innocently weeding when a massive flying earthworm suddenly enters their life!
No cash – instead, a sticker that said ‘I held Rosie’ (the name of that spider – although I imagine there must be more than one Rosie). How could I resist the offer of a sticker?
Fortunately our neighbours were not that much into weeding, so they were hardly ever outside… thinking back, I should not have given them the benefit of a massive, soil-aerating worm.. they didn’t deserve it.
Rosie the Tarantula- lol! Maybe she hangs out with Bob the botfly and Cuddles the coral snake!
I’m sorry, but this just had to be done.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Those are hilarious! The cat above actually looks like my cat, though he’s too fat and lazy to think about get up there even for a spider or maggot.
BTW if felis domesticus the most intelligent of our furry friends is worried I feel justified….
Sarbjit – the tiger bee fly was my photo but I can’t claim credit for the millipede ones.
Here, in the spirit of shameless showing off, are some that I did take:
Big flippin’ centipede in the basement
The aforementioned Tiger Bee Fly – harmless but massive
Millipede. Cute and wriggly. Tickles when it walks on you.
Honkin’ big hornet, just for Heather
And finally:
Completely harmless shamrock orb-weaver (probably), in the garage
More here in case anyone cares. I love
insectsarthropods, mostly./comments hijack
Those photos are really great (I got confused thinking those were the millipedes from your cottage). Wait a sec- I thought you didn’t like centipedes (except when rolling on them). It’s admirable that you can get so up close and personal (via camera) to your fear (says she who has to scroll quickly past the spider pics). I kind of actually like the orb-weaver pic though- what camera/ lens do you use (I’ve photographed grasshoppers, but they usually come out blurry).
Here’s the eagle-like raptor that I refered to in the post (I believe it’s the same individual that attacked me 5 minutes later as it followed me, probably for the crime of taking a bad photo of it).
Had to scroll quickly, too. Thanks a lot, R. {Although the spider and millipede are the least bothersome to me). I prefer your bird, though, Sarbjit. Wildlife from a non-threatening distance – at least when the shot was taken. The cat is definitely cute but augmented by the text. Not fur nuttin’, they’re called lolcats.
If that centipede lived in my basement, I’d be moving to a penthouse apartment. The worst I’ve seen in my basement is a couple of mice (before we got the cats, obviously. Given that our tenant also has two feline friends, it would be a brave mouse that broke into our house these days).
Between that raptor episode and the recent streak of crow attacks that Cath was mentioning, it would seem like the avian population has some kinds of grudge against NN members. Someone should explain to them that it’s not us who are repeatedly rejecting their manuscripts!
see…. this whole comment section is my room 101.
A lovely post Sarbjit! I got reminded again why it is amazing that I have survived in the South of US for more than 2 years considering I increased the amounts of poisonous things with like 1000% since I moved here :)
[the snake story is more of “oh Åsa, watch it there is a brown snake overe there by the water fall” – we were in water, swimming while the others were sitting in the water fall. “snake? in the water? dangerous?!” I nearly drowned since I couldn’t figure out how I was getting out of the water, not to mention that noone had bothered telling me that there weere such things to start with :) The sad little Swede who’s afraid of many things, millipedes or scorpios or spiders… such happiness with frozen ground for more than 4 months to kill the evil things!]
I’ve seen a couple of snakes here in BC. The first time was on a pebbly beach that we’d just landed on, with the intention of camping. I turned to my Serbian friend and asked him if there were any poisonous snakes in BC. He said that he’d expected me to know, being a biologist and all… in the absence of any local knowledge, we kept a careful eye out after that. Going to the outhouse in the dark, through the undergrowth, was particularly fun.
When we got back to civilisation, we looked it up and found that there are no poisonous snakes on the coast, although there are some rattlesnakes in the desert a few hours East of Vancouver.
Asa- That’s why I live on an island with New Jersey kindly serving as an additional critter buffer between me and the South.
So I don’t mind snakes, but snakes+dark+outhouse is asking for trouble. This reminds me of three Hawaii fear stories involving (a) nearly drowning (b) druids at dusk and © cockroaches.
More about ©. I was camping on the beach in Hawaii and before dusk everyone else started heading into their tents. Because Hawaiian beach camping is so romantic, right? Wrong. By dusk there were roaches everywhere- I ran into the tent and read to take my mind off it, but they started literally hurling themselves against the tent walls. By 4am, I needed to visit the outhouse, and made a friend go with me and scout ahead. But, the next morning I found a 2 inch (up to 3 inches with antennae) roach, with the spiny-looking legs sitting in the outhouse bold as brass. Camping outhouses, always bad news.
[cries] I forgot what this post was about. I kept seeing the title in my snapshot page, and vaguely remembered I didn’t want to click it, but forgot why – so I clicked, and I scrolled, and I’m just about to go to bed and I’ve been known to dream about the last things I saw on the internet…
Antidote for scary pictures (Entirely safe to click: it’s a yawning hedgehog on Cute Overload)
snakes+dark+outhouse is asking for trouble
So is big, fat slugs+dark+outhouse…. especially when you’re barefoot. I was only 14; traumatized for life.
Sarbjit> My point exactly. Surrounded by good border of water would be awesome :)
I don’t even want to think about roaches….
Steffi> yes, there is that. slugs that are large without “houses” on top of them… mushy mushy mushy… yack.
Eva> thanks for the so cute pic! it helped me too.
Sarbjit – thanks for the nice words. Hornet was taken with a Nikon Coolpix L16 (point-n-shoot), which explains why it’s a bit unsharp. I think I took the rest with my wife’s Sony DSC-R1, which has a nice chunk of Zeiss optics bolted onto the front of it. I really need a nice macro ring to attach to it though.
The orb-weaver pic was a surprise – shot on a white garage wall, it came out dramatically over-exposed. 100% unintentional but I like the effect.
The centipede ran down the floor drain in the basement just after this photo. It’s probably still down there, growing to crocodilian size. Eek.
The centipede ran down the floor drain in the basement just after this photo. It’s probably still down there, growing to crocodilian size. Eek.
Oh Richard, I have a feeling you’ll really like this one…
7 feet? I’m off to look at lolcats and the hedgehogs again….
Ewwwwwww. I used to dread coming upon that kind of leggy, worm-like thing on the beach. Ick.
Strangely enough, I rather like the Arthropleura, which is pretty enormous but somehow kind of cute.
Maybe this happy chappy will change the arachnophobes’ minds:
(From National Geographic, via Pharyngula)
That is just fabulous!
Probably venomous as hell though. :P
Nothing makes a freaky thing even more freaky than when it’s slightly transparent, has a Joker’s smile on its abdomen and when it has ~40 little ’uns about to be unleashed on the world close nearby……
But that’s actually a really cool photo- thanks Cath!!! I also reckon it’s a little venomous….
Agreed on the cool photo.
Richard, any idea what kind of nasty centipede this was? (I got it out of the house this afternoon without squishing it!)
Heather> That is just wrong. Oh wait, those are CDs…. wait, no… still big centipede.. Clearly i need to go and look at nice things now. Nice, cuddly, fluffy things.
Aarrgghh!
Thanks for my new phobia, guys.
Oh, Abba’s greatest hits…..wait Aaaaargh how did you get that monster out without squishing it? That’s pretty much the freakiest centipede I’ve ever seen!
I dreamt that I was staying in a seedy hotel with fossilized centipedes and other critters embedded in the walls, and then a spider dropped onto me from the ceiling when I went to bed. Just a heads up not to look at this post before you head to bed (or to follow Eva’s link if you do).