Fear: Just Another Story?

Aloha, my friends. Over the past week, we have been learning about the different components of emotions like anger and fear. Fear can be poisonous. It can torment us, rob us of sleep, and preoccupy our thinking. Fear can also be contagious. However, most often, fear is adaptive. It’s an alarm system that prepares our bodies to flee from danger. Fear of real or imagined enemies binds people together as families, tribes, and nations. Fear of injury protects us from harm.

Through conditioning, the short list of naturally painful and frightening events can multiply into a long list of human fears. Learning by observation extends the list. Humans learn fear by observing others, including fears learned from parents and friends.

We may be biologically prepared to learn some fears more quickly than others. Humans quickly learn to fear snakes, spiders, and cliff-fears that most likely helped our ancestors survive. One key to fear learning lies in the amygdala, which plays a key role in associating various emotions, including fear, with certain situations. If an experimenter were to repeatedly blast people with a horn after showing a blue slide, they will begin to react emotionally to the slide. If they have suffered damage to the nearby hippocampus, they still show the emotional reaction-an implicit memory-but they won’t be able to remember why. If they have instead suffered amygdala damage, they will consciously remember the conditioning but will show no emotional effect of it. Patients who lost use of their amygdala are unusually trusting of scary-looking people.

Some people have phobias, intense fears of specific objects or situations, that disrupt their ability to cope. Other are less fearful, and exhibit little fear of a tone that predictably precedes a painful electric shock.

Our genes also influence our fear. Among identical twins, one twin’s level of fearfulness is similar to the other’s-even when they have been reared separately. Scientists have isolated a gene that influences the amygdala’s response to frightening situations. People with a short version of this gene have less of a protein that speeds the reuptake of serotonin. With more serotonin available to activate their amygdala neurons, people with this short gene exhibit an increased amygdala response to frightening pictures.

Over the weekend, I have been reading Divergent, a novel about a dystopian future (think The Hunger Games) where the post-apocalyptic city of Chicago is split into five factions. Long story short, a teenage girl abandons her family in one faction to join another, Dauntless (the brave). Anywho, initiation into Dauntless requires three stages. In the second stage, emotional preparedness, a serum is injected into her skin, which in turn stimulates the amygdala, the part of the brain involved in processing negative emotions-like fear-and then induces a hallucination. The brain's electrical activity is then transmitted to a computer, which then translates the hallucination into a stimulated image that a trainer can see and monitor. After the stimulation, there was something interesting worth noting that was said: "But becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that's the point."Do you think it could be possible to be fearless? Would it involve just overcoming the fear? Are there more components? Or is it learning to control fear? 

Today, I watched an interesting TED Video entitled, What Fear Can Teach Us." In the video, the speaker, Karen Thompson Walker discusses why we are encouraged to view fear as a weakness. The human brain is wired to think optimistically, as shown through the studies of neuroscientists, which can account for why we perceive fear as dangerous. However, what if we looked at fear as something profound, as part of the imagination?

Fear and story-telling have many of the same components: characters, plots, and suspense. The focus question of fear is what will happen next? What will comprise our future? In fear, one thing always leads to another. And if we think of our fears as stories, we can imagine ourselves as authors and readers. However, how we choose to read fear can have an incredible impact on our lives, and the question then becomes, how do we concentrate on reading the "right fears?" Karen Thompson Walker concludes that read properly, fears can be a glimpse into the future and can offer us wisdom and insight.

So, as my final question, is fear something that you perceive as negative, or an emotion you feel has the potential to teach us something? 

For your viewing pleasure, the video is below: