by Dean Burnett
There are many others that differ considerably but seem just as bad.18 It all boils down to the same thing; sometimes the brain just cuts out the middle man and starts inducing fear reactions in the absence of any feasible cause. Since there’s no visible cause, there’s literally nothing that can be done about the situation, so it quickly becomes ‘overwhelming’. This is a panic disorder. Sufferers end up being terrified and alarmed in harmless scenarios, which they then associate with fear and panic, so end up being quite phobic towards them.
Exactly why this panic disorder occurs in the first case is currently unknown, but there are several compelling theories. It could be the result of previous trauma suffered by the individual, as the brain hasn’t yet effectively dealt with the lasting issues caused. It might be to do with an excess or deficiency of particular neurotransmitters. A genetic component is possible, as those directly related to a panic disorder sufferer are more likely to experience it themselves.19 There is even a theory that sufferers are prone to catastrophic thinking; taking a minor physical issue or problem and worrying about it far beyond what it is even vaguely rational.20 It could be a combination of all these things, or something as yet undiscovered. The brain isn’t short of options when it comes to unreasonable fear response.
And finally, we have social anxieties. Or, if they’re so potent they become debilitating, social phobias. Social phobias are based on fear of negative reaction from other people – dreading your audience’s reaction to your karaoke, for instance. We don’t fear only hostility or aggression; simple disapproval is enough to stop us in our tracks. The fact that other people can be a powerful source of phobias is another example of how our brains use other humans to calibrate how we see the world and our position in it. As a result, the approval of others matters, often regardless of who they are. Fame is something millions of people strive for, and what is fame but the approval of strangers? We’ve already covered how egotistical the brain is, so maybe all famous people just crave mass approval? It’s a bit sad really (unless they’re a famous person who has praised this book).
Social anxieties occur when the brain’s tendency to predict and worry about negative outcomes is combined with the brain’s need for social acceptance and approval. Talking on the telephone means interacting without any of the usual cues present in person, so some people (like me) find it very difficult and we panic that we’ll offend or bore the other individual. Paying for shopping with a large queue behind you can be nerve-racking as you’re technically delaying a lot of people who stare at you while you try to use your maths skills working out the payments. These and countless similar situations allow the brain to work out ways in which you’ll annoy or frustrate others, earning negative opinions and causing embarrassment. It boils down to performance anxiety; the worry about getting things wrong in front of an audience.
Some people have no issues with this, but some have the opposite problem. How this comes about has a variety of explanations, but a study by Roselind Lieb found that parenting styles are associated with likelihood of developing anxiety disorders,21 and you can see the logic here. Overly critical parents can instil in a child a constant fear of upsetting a valuable authority figure for even minor actions, whereas overprotective parents can prevent a child from ever experiencing even minor negative consequences of actions, so when they’re older and away from parental protection and something they do does cause a negative outcome, they’re not used to it, so it affects them disproportionately, meaning they’ll be less able to deal with it and will be way more likely to fear it happening again. Even having the dangers of strangers drummed into you constantly from an early age can enhance your eventual fear of them to beyond-appropriate levels.
People experiencing these phobias often display avoidant behaviour, where they actively avoid getting into any scenario where the phobic reaction could come into play.22 This may be good for peace of mind, but it’s bad for doing anything about the phobia in the long run; the more it’s avoided, the longer it stays potent and vivid in the brain. It’s a bit like papering over a mouse hole in your wall; it looks fine to the casual observer, but you’ve still got a rodent problem.
The available evidence suggests social anxieties and phobias are apparently the most common type of phobias.23 This isn’t surprising given the brain’s paranoid tendencies leading us to fear things that aren’t dangerous, and our reliance on approval from others. Put these two together, and we can end up unreasonably fearful of others having a negative opinion of our incompetence. For proof of this, consider the fact that this is the ninth tenth eleventh twelfth twenty-eighth draft I’ve done of this conclusion. And, yes, I’m still sure loads of people won’t like it.
Don’t have nightmares … unless you’re into that sort of thing.
(Why people like being scared and actively seek it out)
Why do so many people literally jump at the chance to risk smearing themselves over the unforgiving ground in pursuit of fleeting excitement? Think of base jumpers, bungee jumpers, parachutists. Everything we’ve learned so far shows the brain’s drive for self-preservation and how that results in nervousness, avoidance behaviour, and so on. Yet authors such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz write books featuring fear-inducing supernatural occurrences and brutal, violent deaths of characters and they are raking it in. They have sold nearly a billion books between them. The Saw franchise, a showcase for the most inventive and gory ways in which humans can be prematurely killed for obscure reasons, currently numbers seven films, all of which were shown in cinemas worldwide rather than sealed in lead containers and launched into the sun. We tell each other scary stories around the campfire, we ride ghost trains, visit haunted houses, dress up as the walking dead at Halloween to extract sweets from neighbours. So how do we explain our enjoyment of these entertainments, some of which are aimed at children no less, that depend on us being scared?
Coincidentally, the thrill of fear and the gratification gained from sweets are both likely to be dependent on the same brain region. This is the mesolimbic pathway, often known as the mesolimbic reward pathway or the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway, because it is responsible for the brain’s sensation of reward, and it uses dopamine neurons to do it. It is one of several circuits and pathways that mediate reward, but it is largely acknowledged as being the most ‘central’ one. And this is what makes it important for the ‘people enjoying fear’ phenomenon.
This pathway is composed of the ventral tegumental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NAc).24 These are very dense collections of circuits and neural relays deep in the brain, with numerous connections and links to the more sophisticated regions including the hippocampus and the frontal lobes, and the more primitive regions such as the brainstem, so it’s a very influential part of the brain.
The VTA is the component that detects a stimulus and determines whether it was positive or negative, something to be encouraged or avoided. It then signals its decision to the NAc, which causes the appropriate response to be experienced. So if you eat a tasty snack, the VTA registers this as a good thing, tells the NAc, which then causes you to experience pleasure and enjoyment. If you accidentally drink rotten milk, the VTA registers this as a bad thing and tells the NAc, which causes you to experience revulsion, disgust, nausea, practically anything the brain can do to ensure you get the message, ‘Do not do that again!’ This system, when taken together, is the mesolimbic reward pathway.
‘Reward’ in this context means the positive, pleasurable feelings experienced when we do something our brain approves of. Typically, these are biological functions, like eating food if hungry, or when said foods are nutrient or resource rich (carbohydrates are a valuable energy source as far as the brain is concerned, hence they can be so difficult to resist for dieters). Other things cause much stronger activation of the reward system: things like sex; hence people spend a lot of time and effort to obtain it, despite the fact that we can live without it. Yes, we can.
It doesn’t even have to be an
ything so essential or vivid. Scratching a particularly persistent itch gives pleasurable satisfaction, which is mediated by the reward system. It’s the brain telling you that what just happened was good, you should do it again.
In the psychological sense, a reward is a (subjectively) positive response to an occurrence, one that potentially leads to a change in behaviour, so what constitutes a reward can vary considerably. If a rat presses a lever and gets a bit of fruit, it’ll press the lever more, so the fruit is a valid reward.25 But if instead of fruit it gets the latest Playstation game, it is unlikely to press the lever more frequently. Your average teenager might disagree, but to a rat a Playstation game is of no use or motivational value, so it’s not a reward. The point of this is to emphasise that different people (or creatures) find different things rewarding – some people like being scared or unnerved, while others don’t and can’t see the appeal.
There are several methods via which fear and danger can become ‘desirable’. To begin with, we are inherently curious. Even animals such as rats have a tendency to explore something novel when presented with the opportunity. Humans even more so.26 Consider how often we do something just to see what happens? Anyone who has children will certainly be familiar with this often-destructive tendency. We are drawn to novelty value. We are faced with a huge variety of new sensations and experiences, so why go for the ones that involve fear and danger, two bad things, rather than the many benign-but-equally-unfamiliar ones?
The mesolimbic reward pathway provides pleasure when you do something good. But ‘something good’ covers a very wide range of possibilities, and this includes when something bad stops happening. Due to adrenalin and the fight-or-flight response, periods of fear and terror are incredibly vivid, where all your senses and systems are alert and poised for danger. But, usually, the source of the danger or fear will go away (especially given our overly paranoid brains). The brain recognises that there was a threat, but now it’s gone.
You were in a haunted house, and now you’re outside. You were hurtling through the air on the way to certain death, but now you’re on the ground and alive. You were hearing a terrifying story, but now it’s finished and the bloodthirsty serial killer never appeared. In each case, the reward pathway is recognising danger that suddenly ceases, so whatever you did to stop the danger, it’s vitally important that you do that next time. As such, it triggers a very powerful reward response. In most cases, like eating or sex, you just did something to improve your existence in the short term, but here you avoided death! This is far more important. On top of this, with the adrenalin of a fight-or-flight response coursing through our systems everything feels enhanced and heightened. The rush and relief that follows a scare can be intensely stimulating – more so than most other things.
The mesolimbic pathway has important neuronal connections and physical links to the hippocampus and the amygdala, allowing it to emphasise memories for certain occurrences it considers important and attach strong emotional resonance to them.27 It not only rewards or discourages behaviour when it happens; it makes sure that the memory for the event is also particularly potent.
The heightened awareness, the intense rush, the vivid memories; all of this combined means that the experience of encountering something seriously scary can make someone feel more ‘alive’ than at any other time. When every other experience seems muted and mundane in comparison, it can be a strong motivator to seek out similar ‘highs’, just as someone used to drinking double-strength espresso won’t find an extra-milky latte especially fulfilling.
And, quite often, it has to be a ‘genuine’ thrill, rather than a synthetic one. The conscious, thinking parts of our brain might be easily fooled in many cases (many of them covered in this book), but they’re not that gullible. As such, a video game where you drive a high-speed vehicle, no matter how visually realistic, can’t hope to provide the same rush and sensation as actually doing it. The same goes for fighting zombies or piloting starships; the human brain recognises what’s real and not real, and can cope with the distinction, despite what the old ‘video games lead to violence’ arguments suggest.
But if realistic video games aren’t scary, how are totally abstract things like stories in books so terrifying? It may be to do with control. When playing a video game, you are in total control of the environment; you can pause the game, it responds to your actions in it, and so on. This isn’t the case for scary books or films, where the individual is a passive observer and, while caught up in the narrative, has no influence over what happens in it. (You can close a book, but that doesn’t alter the story.) Sometimes the impressions and experiences of the film or book can stay with us long after, unsettling us for quite some time. The vivid memories will explain this, as they keep being revisited and activated as they ‘bed in’. Overall, the more the brain retains control over events, the less scary they are. This is why some things that are ‘best left to the imagination’ are actually more terrifying than the goriest effects.
The 1970s, long before CGI and advanced prosthetics, are widely regarded by connoisseurs of the genre as a golden age of horror films. All the scares had to come from suggestion, timing, atmosphere and other clever tricks. As a result, the brain’s tendency to look for and predict threats and dangers did most of the work, causing people literally to jump at shadows. The arrival of cutting-edge effects via big Hollywood studios meant the actual horror was far more blatant and direct, with buckets of blood and CGI replacing psychological suspense. There’s room for both approaches, and others, but when the horror is conveyed so directly, the brain isn’t as engaged, leaving it free to think and analyse, and remain aware that this is all a fictional scenario that could be avoided at any time, and as such the scares don’t have the same impact. Video game makers have learned this, with survival horror games being a genre that requires the character to avoid an overwhelming danger in a tense, uncertain environment, rather than blow it into countless wobbly pieces with an oversized laser cannon.28
It’s arguably the same with extreme sports and other thrill-seeking activities. The human brain is perfectly able to distinguish actual risk from artificial risk, and there usually needs to be the very real possibility of unpleasant consequences for the true thrill to be experienced. A complex set-up using screens, harnesses and giant fans could feasibly replicate the sensation of bungee jumping, but it would be unlikely to be authentic enough to convince your brain that you are falling from a great height, and thus the danger of actually hitting the ground is removed, and the experience is not the same. The perception of travelling up and down quickly through space is hard to replicate without actually doing it, hence the existence of rollercoasters.
The less control you have over the scary sensation, the more thrilling it is. But there’s a cut-off point, as there still has to be some influence over events in order to make it ‘fun’ scary, rather than simply terrifying. Falling out of a plane with a parachute is considered exciting and fun. Falling out of a plane without a parachute on your back is not. For the brain to enjoy a thrilling activity, it seems there has to be some actual risk involved, but also some ability to influence the outcome, so the risks can be avoided. Most people who survive a car crash feel relieved to be alive, but there’s rarely any desire to go through it again.
Also, the brain has that weird habit, hinted at earlier, called counterfactual thinking; the tendency to dwell on the possible negative outcomes of events that never happened.29 This is going to be even more noticeable when the event itself was a scary one, as there’s the sense of actual danger. If you narrowly avoid being hit by a car while crossing the road, you might think about how you could have been hit for days afterwards. But you weren’t; nothing has physically changed for you at all. But the brain really does like to focus on a potential threat, be it in the past, present or future.
People who enjoy this sort of thing are often labelled adrenalin junkies. ‘Sensation seeking’ is a recognised personality trait,30 where individuals
constantly strive for new, varied, complex and intense experiences, invariably at some physical/financial/legal risk (losing money and getting arrested are also dangers many people strongly wish to avoid). The previous paragraphs argued that a certain amount of control over events is required to enjoy thrills properly, but it’s possible that sensation-seeking tendencies cloud the ability to assess or recognise risk and control accurately. A psychological study from the late 1980s looked at skiers, comparing injured skiers to uninjured skiers.31 They found injured skiers were far more likely to be sensation seekers than the uninjured ones, suggesting their drive for thrilling sensations caused them to make decisions or perform actions that pushed events beyond their ability to control, resulting in injury. It’s a cruel irony that a desire for seeking risk may also cloud your ability to recognise it.
Why some people end up with such extreme tendencies is uncertain. It could just happen gradually, a brief flirtation with a risky experience providing some enjoyable thrills, leading to seeking out more and more with ever increasing intensity. This is the traditional ‘slippery slope’ argument. Quite an appropriate term for skiers, really.
Some studies have looked into more biological or neurological factors. There’s some evidence that certain genes, such as DRD4, which encodes a certain class of dopamine receptor, can be mutated in sensation-seeking individuals, suggesting that activity in the mesolimbic reward pathway is altered, resulting in changes in the way sensations are rewarded.32 If the mesolimbic pathway is more active, intense experiences may be even more powerful. But if it is less powerful, it may require more intense stimulation to achieve true enjoyment as a result; the sort of thing most of us take for granted would require extra life-risking effort. Either way, people could end up seeking more stimulation. Trying to figure out the role of a specific gene in the brain is always a long and complex process, so we don’t know this for certain yet.