Hey Blue here.
I found this stick outside and though it probably belonged to a tree, it looks like it could
be an antenna that belonged to a rather large insect...
Whether it's insects or arachnids.
Bugs have a tendency to give us the creeps.
Ants, maggots, cockroaches, spiders, centipedes, beetles, grasshoppers, bees… you get the
idea.
Even when we know that most of these tiny creatures can't hurt us, we flip out when
they land on us, we throw giant versions of them in horror films, and we spend large sums
of time and money to exterminate them.
Entomophobia is the irrational fear of insects and unlike coulrophobia, entomophobia is officially
listed in the DSM-5.
Even when it can be treated by cognitive behavioral therapy, there are even more specific cases
like apiphobia or melissophobia, the fear of bees and myrmecophobia, the fear of ants.
Then there’s arachnophobia, which focuses more on the fear of spiders and scorpions.
While not everyone suffers from this- and according to some sources, only 6% of humans
actually have this phobia, it seems that the general opinion on bugs is that they are creepy
pests.
In Chapman University’s 2016 Survey on American Fears, 25% of respondents said they were afraid
of insects and/or spiders.
This was more than the number of people who feared becoming the victim of a violent crime,
germs, or even dying.
So why are these bugs, so tiny and harmless, so utterly terrifying?
Behaviorists currently believe that this irrational fear of bugs is caused by a traumatic event.
Some scientists believe that humans are naturally born with at least two distinct phobias: large
sounds and the sensation of falling.
They’re related to our natural instinct of fight or flight.
It’s proposed that what we fear afterwards is a result of nurture.
In other words, our experiences after birth teach us to fear new things.
Scientists believe this has something to do with how our brains develop into organizing
memories.
After the age of 6, we start to store 10% of our experiences into our conscious mind,
while the other 90% goes into our subconscious.
Prior to that age of 6, everything is sent to our subconscious to later be brought up
in the future.
So what if as a baby, you saw a spider in the corner.
Naturally, we'd expect you to not think anything of it, having no experience with it prior.
Then suddenly an adult comes along and yells at you not to go near it, pulls you away from
it, or kills it.
In your subconscious baby mind, this new experience will become a folder called "spider", and
within that folder, this memory will be filed, associating spider, with danger.
Perhaps in the future, when you see a spider again, your brain will access this information
in your subconscious and instinctively give you a sense of danger based on that memory.
Perhaps this phobia will have developed to any similar-looking creatures on the planet
with more than 4 limbs?
But could we be reacting to an instinctual fear deeply imbedded into our very DNA?
In an interview, Dr. Jeffrey Lockwood, author of “The Infested Mind: Why Humans Loathe,
Fear, and Love Insects”, said that people both react with fear and disgust in response
to bugs first, due to evolution.
While bugs are mostly harmless, some of them do bite or sting.
Evolution does still have a role in our instinctive negative reaction to bugs.
The Zika epidemic in 2016 served to remind us that bugs can carry devastating diseases.
Some scientists believe that our fear of these creepy critters is an overly cautious, but
hardwired, form of self-preservation.
Monkeys will jump in alarm at the sight of a wiggling rope, even if they’ve never yet
encountered a snake.
This could indicate that over a long enough period of time of its ancestors seeing serpentine
creatures as a threat, the monkey species developed a natural phobia instinctively rooted
at birth.
A study in 2001 showed volunteers pictures that included spiders, snakes, mushrooms and
flowers and asked them to find a target object in the photo.
Overall, participants spotted the spiders and snakes the fastest above all else.
Those who mentioned that they had a specific fear for spiders or snakes were even faster
at spotting them.
This indicates that when it comes to a threat, emotion drives our attention.
In her book, “The Mind-Brain Relationship”, Regina Pally says that “presumably, the
amygdala contains ‘prepared’ fears, meaning innate fears ‘handed down’ through evolution,
which do not require a prior experience of danger.”
What does this mean?
We experience a full range of stress, anxiety, and fear, even when we’re babies; that these
‘prepared’ fears can emerge spontaneously.
But their status as a potential threat alone can’t be the only reason we have such a
potent negative reaction.
Our feelings of fear against bugs are tightly mixed with equal feelings of disgust.
Lions, tigers, and bears are for instance, incredibly dangerous animals to us in the
wild, and though we’d run away from them just the same, we still use them in our cartoons
and children’s movies, turning them into cute and cuddly version of themselves.
So why is this not so much the case for bugs?
It has to do with something called the “rejection response”.
What’s worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
Biting into an apple and finding half of a worm.
It’s the overwhelming feeling that you need to get this thing away from you, immediately-
like, right now.
But this response also has its roots in biology- just like fear, it's a mechanism designed
to keep us safe.
We’ve learned that the presence of insects usually means that something isn’t safe
to eat or even touch, and over the eons, we’ve grown to associate bugs with the threat of
sickness itself.
Another reason for our fear of bugs could just be that they simply look weird.
Their physical forms are so vastly different from our own, with exoskeletons, too many
legs, too many eyes- the jittery way that they move.
They’re the closest known creatures on the planet to monsters and aliens.
And they’re very real.
Or perhaps it's their tendency to be rather invasive.
These days we generally fancy clean and hygienic living spaces.
It gives us a sense of control and direction in our lives.
The invasion of bugs in that living space might serve as a subliminal yet powerful reminder
of how much we’re not in control.
Or perhaps their sheer numbers alone, stir something deep within our fears:
The Jungian psychologist, James Hillman, has argued that a swarm of bugs “threatens our
fondly cherished human notions of individuality and independence.
They indicate the insignificance of us individuals”.
But again, what if our fear goes deeper still?
What if there's yet another reason for our fear of bugs, locked much deeper than our
modern day experiences in the furthest most ancient regions of our DNA?
If that were the case, then the question we must ask is, what could have our ancestors
possibly experienced for us to fear bugs on such a potent and powerful level?
The origin of life on our planet starts with the origin of water.
While its origins still aren’t understood, some astronomers speculate that water originated
on Earth when it was hit by comets and asteroids made of ice.
It wasn't until about 4.6 billion years ago that the first single-celled organisms began
to develop from that water.
In that time, life began to develop.
And 500 million years ago, land life began to flourish.
We don't know very much about the lifeforms that dominated the planet back then.
But we CAN presume the conditions for survival were a lot harsher…
We often liken the world of insects to that of an alien world.
And it's not hard to see why.
The appearance of pretty much every bug on the planet when brought to scale is absolutely
eluding.
What if our ancestors fought and feared giant predators whose descendants would later go
on to become what we know today as bugs?
About 350 million years ago, giant bugs once roamed the planet.
Its said that in prehistoric planet Earth, the higher levels of oxygen, 50% greater to
be exact, allowed for what today we would consider life size bugs.
Fossils show that huge cockroaches and giant dragonflies the size of large birds once existed,
and it was only until the evolutionary introduction of birds that they began to decrease in size.
However, hominids or great apes really only developed about 15 to 20 million years ago.
And if that's true, our simian ancestors couldn’t have shared the same planet with these giant
bugs, and it’s highly unlikely we’d find evidence to support this idea.
But is it possible that somewhere far back enough, an ancestor of our ancestors may have
had contact with larger alien-like creatures?
Personally, despite this, I still think there's more to the equation that we're not seeing.
I still have a hard time looking at closeup images of insects.
I know logically they're harmless, but the potent and primal fear is still there, welling
up inside me and I know I can't be the only one.
But what do you think?
Is it an extreme form of disgust based on their exaggerated facial and bodily structures
and the way they move?
Is it that they are indicative of disease or death?
Or is it something deeper, embedded in our evolutionary history?
Share your thoughts below and let's get this conversation going!