The Fear Paradox Read online

  “Fear is not the adrenaline rush. It’s that helpless feeling of being alone in the dark.”

  —Travis Fahs

  A patient named Ella came in one day and told me her radiologist had found something suspicious on a recent x-ray. The x-ray was ordered to try to understand the source of a mysterious pain she was experiencing in her lower back. Ella was clearly upset and worried. Her grandfather had died of lung cancer, and Ella had been a smoker for many years before she quit. The fear of cancer was very close to the surface for her.

  My first feeling for Ella was concern. I cared a great deal for her, and as she spoke, I worried that maybe she did have cancer. A series of vague images began to fill my mind. I imagined us dealing with the pain and despair. A frightening future flashed before my eyes. I wondered what this would mean for her. What kind of a final chapter would this be? Ella had suffered a great deal in her life and had finally begun to find some peace.

  As Ella told me what she was experiencing, I could see how frightened she was. I could also see her imagination, just like mine, kicking into high gear. She began to recount all the tiny symptoms and physical sensations that she imagined were evidence of a cancer she was now about to face—the fatigue, the moments of dizziness, the insomnia the night before, the lack of appetite, a tenderness in her abdomen, stiffness in her neck, shortness of breath. And even though there was no conclusive evidence, Ella just kept repeating, “It could be; I was a smoker; it could be cancer.” And of course, Ella was right. It could be.

  Aristotle was perhaps one of the first to give voice to the phenomenon that had gripped Ella when he said, “Let fear, then, be a kind of pain or disturbance resulting from the imagination of impending danger, either destructive or painful.”36 The relationship of Fear to imagination that Aristotle was proposing brings front-and-center the question we arrived at in the last chapter related to perception. Fear, we discovered, is an emotional alarm that requires some form of activation. For the most part, this comes from sensory cues signaling danger. But now we are faced with another question. Can fear be triggered by imagination? And if so, as we saw with Ella, can we ever know for sure whether our fears are realistic?

  Certainly our fears feel real, but are they? Our appraisal of what is scary is highly unique to each of us, regardless of how similar we may be. What I am afraid of is both similar to and different from each of you, no doubt. It is not a consideration of whether one perspective is more accurate or valuable than another; it is just to note that our individual fears are subjectively different. And even though there are a great many shared fears, our experience of those fears appears to be infused with something unique to each of us—what Aristotle was calling “imagination.” Threat assessment, then, is not the internalization of objective reality, but an amalgam of sensory experience and our personal, imaginative coloration.

  The Boogeyman in the Closet

  Infants and children seem to go through fairly predictable stages of fear. Moreover, research indicates that these stages are consistent across cultures.37 We can glean from this that innate fears appear to have offered us an evolutionary advantage. This fact is interesting enough, but even more fascinating is the possibility that these innate, cross-cultural fears still have relevance for us today.

  Understanding the natural unfolding of fear throughout infancy and childhood dates back to 1897, when G. Stanley Hall, the first president of Clark University and one of the pioneers in child developmental research, conducted the first systematic study of children’s fears.38 What he saw then is quite similar to what we see today. At about eight months of age, and continuing until a child is approximately two or three years old, infants fear strangers, particularly men. This fear does not seem to be different when children are cared for communally or in familial isolation with their mother.

  A second fear that emerges developmentally is fear of separation. This, not surprisingly, occurs as an infant begins to explore away from his or her mother, at around twelve months, and continues until about two or three years of age. This manifestation is easily recognized at bedtime, but it is also present on the playground, when a toddler begins to explore in ever-widening arcs away from his or her parent. At some point, they look back to make sure they can still see their parent, and most importantly, to make sure that their parent hasn’t abandoned them.

  The third innate fear that young children all seem to pass through is the fear of monsters and demons. So many of my patients have memories of worrying about the Boogeyman. For some, the monster was under the bed and for others it was in the closet. But what is important to note about this developmental stage of fear, as distinct from the other two I mentioned, is that the object of dread is being conjured up in the imagination. This seems to correlate with the advent of more sophisticated cognitive capacity.

  The innate nature of these fears tells us something important about what threats were present for us throughout the course of evolution. The very helplessness of the infant and child demanded proximity to the caregiver. Also evident is the apparent threat that infants faced from other humans outside the closest circle of family. Finally, as children grew older, they learned to be afraid of unseen predators: predators or monsters that they knew existed—in the closet, under the bed. It was evidently prudent for them to keep the possible existence of these predators in mind, even if they couldn’t actually see them.

  Although most of these childhood fears seem to lessen by adolescence, there is one fear that remains with us long into adulthood—at least metaphorically.

  When Night Falls

  It’s hard to imagine how afraid we once were as a species. How many nights we must have lain awake, unable to close our eyes, staring out into the dark. Waiting. Watching. Futilely attempting to discern shapes and forms—shades of black upon black, like some kind of mocking modernist painting. And if we did eventually see something coming out of that darkness, a feline predator perhaps, we knew instantly that it was too late. The dark held mortal dangers, and it appears that we have not found a way to purge this traumatic memory from our DNA.

  In thinking about the evolutionary basis of our fear of the dark, we need first to be aware that Homo sapiens were not the toughest kids on the block. The fact that we came to dominate the planet is not a testament to our ability to physically defend against predators and other threatening species, but rather, a function of our ability to adapt and outsmart.39

  Large predatory cats such as lions have always lived near hominids.40 Recent research suggests that feline predators are much more likely to attack after dusk and in low-light moon stages. And, according to some, lions were at one time the most widely distributed mammal in the world. Clearly, the threat from nocturnal predators ranks high in our ascription of danger to the dark.

  In addition, it seems that our “mastery” of fire, 350,000 to 500,000 years ago, was of little help to us in guarding against our vulnerability in the dark. Yes, it kept us warm, kept a few animals away, and did define a place of certainty in the dark unknown, but what could it really do for us in the big picture? It was a tiny spot of orange in a sea of black. Sadly, light never solves the dark. It merely brings it into sharper focus. And scarily enough, that spot of orange becomes a beacon for those who nefariously wish to know where we are.

  By its very nature, the dark is problematic due to our inability to see into it. Without sight, humans are at risk from any number of dangers. If you have ever tried to walk with a blindfold, you know what I mean. In the dark, we are vulnerable to running into sharp objects, walking off a cliff, or twisting an ankle on uneven terrain. Even without the threat of predators, the dark demands caution.

  I think we have all had the experience of walking down a dark street in an unfamiliar setting and feeling our bodies respond with heightened vigilance. And if, under these conditions, we then hear footsteps behind us, we might indeed be moved to panic, or at least to experience a mild adrenaline rush
.

  The effects of the dark on our assessment of danger has great potential importance for us in our understanding of Fear. Research related to this has been extensively done by Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia.41 In his experiments, subjects were asked to view photographs of men and rate the level of danger that these men posed. As a variable, Schaller and his associate, Steven Neuberg, experimentally manipulated the amount of light present in the lab room while the subjects rated the photographs. From this, they discovered that, when controlling for other variables, perceptions of danger significantly increased under ambient dark conditions.

  The dark makes us more afraid with expectations of potential threat. But are these threats real? This is the question that came into focus most clearly for me with my patient Tony. He arrived for his session one morning feeling quite stressed. He had been talking in past sessions about his need for control and how he tried to manage the many plans he had for himself and those he loved. I remember thinking, “He really loves the feeling of control.” I realized that I had drifted off into this reverie when Tony startled me by asking me to change the light in the room—specifically, if I could adjust the blinds to make the room brighter. I said that I would be happy to, but that it might be useful to discuss his feelings about the light. As I opened the blinds, he began to tell me about light and dark, and finally, about his methods for falling asleep. Like many individuals, Tony preferred to fall asleep to the sound of the television. But he also preferred to keep all of the lights on. Needless to say, this was challenging for his wife, so they slept separately—Tony in the living room and his wife in the bedroom. I think I said something to him then about his fear of the dark, and he quickly cut me off. “It’s not that I’m afraid of the dark, it’s that I’m afraid of what happens to me in my mind in the dark.”

  Tony’s observation on the dark and the mind sparked a contemplation for me that would eventually become the foundation for this book. Something does indeed seem to happen to us in our minds in the dark. And whether we call it warranted apprehension or paranoid imagining, the dark evokes a phantasmagoria of frights that operate outside of our rational assessment of threat.

  Perceiving in the Dark

  What we need to acknowledge first is that darkness is a condition of nature that makes it difficult for us to determine risk. Evidently, our experience with the dark has contributed to our innate fear of it. How many thousands of generations of learning were required to etch this fear so deeply into our DNA? No doubt, our fear of the dark has served our survival, but it has also rendered us prone to overreactions in the face of uncertainty. Reasonable support has been found to assert that bullying, gang violence, and tribal warfare all can be significantly attributed to a sense of threat and “perceived vulnerability to danger.”42 And, if there is one aspect of the dark that is inescapable, it is its inherent relationship to the unseen and the unpredictable.

  Following from this vulnerability is the recognition that much of what makes us human began in the dark. I am not just referring to our fear of it, but to what this fear inspired in us. Solving our relationship to the dark, I believe, stretched the limits of our brains until one day, perhaps fifty thousand years ago, a tiny glimmer of something new emerged, something we now call the mind.43

  As we noted in Chapter Two, danger is only actionable when it is perceived. This is the problem with the dark; danger might be lying just beyond the reach of our vision, and we might not even know it. Many species have a simple solution for this problem—smell. Nocturnal hunters, as well as prey, often have highly developed olfaction, and with this they pierce the darkness quite well. But in our evolution, we Homo sapiens seemed to find ourselves relying on other mutations. For example, we needed to travel greater distances, and because of this, we evolved a revolutionary capacity to walk on two legs. Overall, this shift toward bipedalism brought us to a more upright posture. Multiple systems appear to have contributed to our following this evolutionary course.44 We moved away from smell to a heavier reliance on vision. Our snout began to retract, and our eyes became set much more centrally on our faces. We acquired stereoscopic vision, an ability to see color, elongation of our legs and shrinking of our pelvis. Together, these changes brought us dramatically toward what we know today to be the human being.45 But these changes also brought us into a new relationship to the dark, one that required new forms of vision.

  One of the most interesting elements of human vision is called “blindsight.” Gordon Binsted, from the University of British Columbia, has studied blindsight extensively and describes it as a “second sight.” It relates to the existence of a secondary optic nerve that transmits certain types of visual information directly from the eye to the midbrain, the area of the brain that has been identified as capable of instantaneously, and non-consciously, activating defensive motoric responses such as ducking.46

  In Binsted’s research, subjects with cortical blindness—in other words, with functional retinas, but dysfunctional vision centers near the back of the brain—were able to detect peripheral objects even though they lacked primary vision. This means that the midbrain was able to respond defensively to potential threats without conscious awareness.

  Blindsight, once thought to be a secondary neural development following the loss of cortical vision, is now understood to exist, on some level, for all of us. And if Binsted is right in his hunch about the evolution of this secondary visual defensive system, then it would be a defensive system that developed as a step toward solving the problem of unseen aerial danger—in other words, the dark.

  Another area of invisible threat that needed to be solved was the realm of infection and poisoning from putrid, toxic, or rotting substances. Somehow, along the evolutionary path, we developed the emotion of disgust, to help us “see” these invisible enemies.47 Similar to blindsight, disgust is capable of identifying invisible threats and activating motoric behaviors that keep us away from the danger.

  As we might imagine, the avoidance of putrid, toxic, or poisonous substances was vital to our survival. The fact that we developed an emotional module specifically to deal with these forms of danger is quite remarkable. Our senses had to learn which smells and sights indicated the existence of this type of danger. It is not that we see the actual danger, the microbes, but we see and smell what indicates the possible existence of dangerous microbes. Quite impressive.

  As we can begin to see, the problem of unseen danger has had a significant effect on the evolution of human threat detection systems. But more than this, the unseen and the unknowable appear to have shaped the very nature of our minds.

  The Evolution of Imagination

  In 1987, Alan Leslie, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, asked an important question regarding the evolutionary necessity of pretend play. He wondered why the human being, so dependent upon a logical appraisal of reality, would spend so much time in childhood developing the capacity for pretend play.48

  In answering the question of the relevance of pretend play, Leslie presented an elegant description of the subtle cognitive shifts that occur in the act of pretending. He called this shift “decoupling,” the process of maintaining connection with the meta-representation while loosening the primary representation. An example of this is what happens when we hold a banana up to our ear and pretend that it is an old-fashioned telephone. The primary representation of “banana” is decoupled, separated from its primary meaning. From this, both literal meaning (banana as fruit) and metaphoric meaning (banana as telephone) are able to coexist without disrupting either meaning.

  This is what formed the basis for what Leslie called “Theory of Mind.” In this model, what the psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy later termed “mentalizing,” Leslie posited that the mental mechanism necessary to perform the cognitive shift from one state to another is the same mechanism that allows us to understand the existence of a mind, both our own and that of another. Being
able to conceptualize this internal space in which a mind exists is central to what marked the evolutionary movement to becoming human.

  In both pretense and the conceptualization of mind, there is a need to bridge the distance between what is known and what is unknown. For, as much as we might imagine that we know what lies within the mind of another, it does forever remain a mystery. We use what we know of ourselves to “imagine” what might lie within the mind of another.

  Related to this is the work done by two cognitive linguists, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In 1980, they came together to write what has become a seminal study on the nature of metaphor and its place in culture. The book, Metaphors We Live By,49 puts forth the basic idea that metaphor provides the underpinnings for much of our daily life experience. Abstract conceptual systems are understood through metaphoric processes and, in parallel to this, our metaphors become conceptual. For example, description of things like significance, or the elements of argumentation, is done through a comparison of the abstract to the concrete.

  For example:

  -Argument is conceptualized as WAR when we say things like, “He defended his position by spouting a bunch of theory”; or “His position on this subject is indefensible.”

  -Significance as an abstract value is conceived to be LARGE in physical size: “That is a really big idea”; “He’s some kind of big banker”; “She is a really big deal in advertising.”

  Not only is metaphor a basis for understanding abstract concepts, but, in a parallel manner to Theory of Mind, it appears to have been crucial to the evolution of human intelligence. Using one concept to understand another, and the ability to blend and combine, provided us as humans with a vastly superior potential for adaptation.50

  A crucial difference between us and other mammalian species, particularly primates, rests upon this adaptive potential that we appear to have acquired about fifty thousand years ago. Because of this, we became the only species to successfully migrate to wildly diverse ecosystems and build eco-specific cultures.