Big neurons wouldn’t be of any use if the creatures couldn’t show associative learning, which is the point here. We’ve hinted at this before; in the section on diet and appetite in Chapter 1, it was observed how the brain can make the cake–illness association and you feel sick just thinking about it. The same mechanism can apply to phobias and fears.
If you get warned against something (meeting strangers, electrical wiring, rats, germs), your brain is going to extrapolate all the bad things that could happen if you encounter it. Then you do encounter it, and your brain activates all these “likely” scenarios, and activates the fight-or-flight response. The amygdala, responsible for encoding the fear component of memory, attaches a danger label to memories of the encounter. So, the next time you encounter this thing, you’ll remember danger, and have the same reaction. When we learn to be wary of something we end up fearing it. In some people, this can end up as a phobia.
This process implies that literally anything can become the focus of a phobia, and if you’ve ever seen a list of existing phobias this seems to be the case. Notable examples include turophobia (fear of cheese), xanthophobia (fear of the color yellow, which has obvious overlaps with turophobia), hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words, because psychologists are basically evil) and phobophobia (fear of having a phobia, because the brain regularly turns to the concept of logic and says, “Shut up, you’re not my real dad!”). However, some phobias are considerably more common than others, suggesting that there are other factors at play.
We have evolved to fear certain things. One behavioral study taught chimps to be afraid of snakes. This is a relatively straightforward task, usually involving showing them a snake and following this with an unpleasant sensation, like a mild electric shock or unpleasant food, just something they want to avoid if possible. The interesting part is that when other chimps saw them react fearfully to snakes, they quickly learned to fear snakes too, without having been trained.13 This is often described as “social learning.”*
Social learning and cues are incredibly powerful, and the brain’s “better safe than sorry” approach when it comes to dangers means if we see someone being afraid of something, there’s a good chance we’ll be afraid of it too. This is especially true during childhood, where our understanding of the world is still developing, largely via the input of others who we assume know more than we do. So if our parents have a particularly strong phobia, there’s a good chance we’ll end up with it, like a particularly unsettling hand-me-down. It makes sense: if a child sees a parent, or their primary educator/teacher/provider/role model, start shrieking and flapping because they’ve seen a mouse, this is bound to be a vivid and unsettling experience, one that makes an impression on a young mind.
The brain’s fear response means phobias are hard to get rid of. Most learned associations can be removed eventually via a process established in Pavlov’s famous dogs experiment. A bell was associated with food, prompting a learned response (salivation) whenever it was heard, but if the bell was then rung repeatedly in the continued absence of food, eventually the association faded. This same procedure can be used in many contexts, and is known as extinction (not to be confused with what happened to the dinosaurs).16 The brain learns that the stimulus such as the bell isn’t associated with anything and therefore doesn’t require a specific response.
You’d think that phobias would be subject to a similar process, given how almost every encounter with their cause results in no harm whatsoever. But here’s the tricky part: the fear response triggered by the phobia justifies it. In a masterpiece of circular logic, the brain decides that something is dangerous, and as a result it sets off the fight-or-flight response when it encounters it. This causes all the usual physical reactions, flooding our systems with adrenalin, making us tense and panicked and so on. The fight-or-flight response is biologically demanding and draining and often unpleasant to experience, so the brain remembers this as “The last time I met that thing, the body went haywire, so I was right; it is dangerous!” and thus the phobia is reinforced, not diminished, regardless of how little actual harm the individual came to.
The nature of the phobia also plays a part. Thus far we’ve described the simple phobias (phobias triggered by specific things or objects, having an easily identified and avoidable source), but there are also complex ones (phobias triggered by more complicated things such as contexts or situations). Agoraphobia is a type of complex phobia, generally misunderstood as fear of open spaces. More precisely, agoraphobia is a fear of being in a situation where escape would be impossible or help would be absent.17 Technically, this can be anywhere outside the person’s home, hence severe agoraphobia prevents people from leaving the house, leading to the “fear of open spaces” misconception.
Agoraphobia is strongly associated with panic disorder. Panic attacks can happen to anyone—the fear response overwhelms us and we can’t do anything about it and we feel distressed/terrified/can’t breathe/nauseated/head spins/trapped. The symptoms vary from person to person, and an interesting article by Lindsey Homes and Alissa Scheller for the Huffington Post in 2014 entitled “This is what a panic attack feels like” collected some personal descriptions from sufferers, one of which was: “Mine are like I can’t stand up, I can’t speak. All I feel is an intense amount of pain all over, like something is just squeezing me into this little ball. If it is really bad I can’t breathe, I start to hyperventilate and I throw up.”
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.