Gotchya!
I was watching hilarious cat videos of
cats being scared by cucumbers.
You put it behind them while they’re
eating or something and they go berzerk
as soon as they see it.
So, I decided to do it with my cats.
That is, until Alie told me that it’s
actually not very good for them
and you definitely should not
purposefully freak out your cats.
Apparently it triggers a stress response
and since you can’t explain to your cat
afterwards that it was a joke, it’s...
Well it's just not very nice.
But why are cats scared of cucumbers?
Well, when this whole phenomenon was discovered,
there were a few theories floated out there.
The one that seemed most promising
was that cats have an “innate fear” of them.
That is, the fear is hard-wired into
the cat’s DNA.
It's existed from birth.
Wait, so cats are innately afraid of cucumbers?
Well, no, not really.
They’re afraid of the shape of cucumbers
because it slightly resembles the shape of a snake.
Think about it.
If primordial cats
encountered snakes, the cats that were
scared of snakes would’ve survived.
And those that were not would’ve...
Well, I mean, you know.
However, this is not true!
Cats actually hunt snakes.
So what’s freaking out our cats?
Well, it’s probably the fact that there’s just a
strange object that wasn’t there before.
Not as cool.
But all this talk about cats got me thinking
about human flesh bags.
Do we have innate fears?
Pivot to science!
This place is creepy!
Scientists have been exploring fear
for a long time and innate fears have been
of particular interest because,
well, they could give us a glimpse into
the lives of our ancient ancestors.
Most of our fears, it turns out, are learned.
We learn to fear bears and tornados
and guns and Willem Dafoe.
But some fears are innate.
You might ask yourself,
“how can we tell the difference?”
Well that’s easy.
You do studies on babies, before they’ve
learned what they should be afraid of!
Yep, that’s right.
I’m advising you against scaring your cats,
but babies are totally fair game.
Until recently, scientists believed that
we had two innate fears.
The fear of falling and the fear of loud noises.
If you’ve ever taken an intro to psych class,
you probably remember the visual cliff experiment.
That's essentially where you had babies
placed on a flat, checkered surface
that butts up against a sheet of glass at the same level.
But then the surface falls down a few feet,
making it look like a cliff.
But the baby can’t actually fall off
because there’s still glass there.
When babies were placed on the shallow end
and the mother called to them from the deep end,
a vast majority of babies crawled to the edge,
but went no further.
Or they cried because, well,
they couldn’t reach their mother.
Scientists have taken this as evidence that
humans are naturally afraid of falling.
This place gives me the creeps.
Let's get outta here.
The same thing goes for loud noises.
Think about a time when your cat
knocked a glass bowl or something
off of a shelf.
When a sudden noise is louder than
80 decibels, which is about as loud as
a garbage disposal or blender,
it can trigger the acoustic startle reflex.
When we're startled by a loud noise,
a signal gets sent straight to our brains
in less than 10 milliseconds before being
sent out to our motor neurons.
Alie could always do a video about this startle reflex,
so I'm not going to go into detail about
the pathway in the brain, but
it’s pretty cool.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a baby or a full grown adult.
Your brain and body will respond to sudden, loud noises.
What’s interesting about these innate fears
is that they are also shared with most other mammals.
They did the visual cliff experiment, for example,
with baby chicks lambs, piglets, kittens and puppies.
All of them found the same results.
And if you’ve ever clapped while
your cat was sitting on your lap,
you get that same startle response.
As well as a few claw marks on your thighs.
So those are cool and all, but
what if I told you that scientists recently
found evidence of another innate fear?
Yeah!
I told you, so...
Now you know.
Okay, so three months ago, a group of scientists from
the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
and Uppsala University conducted a study
to examine the fear of snakes and spiders.
The fear of snakes and spiders are the
most-reported specific phobias.
And the researchers suspected that
spiders and snakes could be “ancestral threats”.
In other words, our ancestors may have been
the ones that were smart enough to
avoid or kill the spiders and snakes,
and therefore lived on to reproduce more.
To study this, they brought in 6-month old babies,
sat them in front of a screen,
and showed them pictures.
Meanwhile, an infrared eye tracker monitored
their pupil dilation, which is linked to arousal.
AKA: Fear.
The images would switch between
something innocuous, like a beach ball,
to one of the “ancestral threats”.
For example, a bear.
The innocuous picture always had similar
shape and coloring as the threat’s picture
in order to limit the number of variables
that could affect the results.
So, for example, a red and black spider would
be paired with a red and black flower.
A green snake would be paired with a green fish.
What the researchers found was that there was no noticeable change for snakes.
But, there was a significant increase in arousal
in response to spiders.
What is it about our 8-legged friends that
gives us the heebie jeebies?
It’s especially interesting because most spiders
aren’t actually dangerous to humans.
But snakes definitely are.
Especially in Australia.
Everything’s deadly in Australia.
It may just be part of human nature,
but more research still needs to be done
to confirm these findings.
And to figure out why spiders are so scary.
No matter the reason, it’s one step towards
understanding our fears and how they came to be.
And understanding our fears is really valuable
for modern humans, because
fear and fear responses play a big role in
mental illnesses, like PTSD and other anxiety disorders.
If we can figure out what triggers a fear response,
we might be able to figure out how to
treat it better in the future.
But remember, there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
Thanks for watching this episode of Micah Psych!
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I’m gonna upload a video of my cat chirping at some birds.
It has nothing to do with fear, but I think it’s pretty cute.
Until next time, I’m Micah.
Haha, gotchya!