In another thread I got thinking about fear. If a person has fear but can control it then it's priceless, nothing I've ever experienced can come near to it's ability to focus the mind and metabolise all physical resources available, it has the ability to change us physically, increasing strength and speed. It's bloody obvious why it's an evolutionary success as a system. BUT, the point of balance between controlling fear and losing control of it is narrow and if control over it is lost then it has the opposite effects. More fear than can be controlled hampers thought, disrupts the body, and readily turn well learned skills into clumsy, ineffective behaviour, memory can be harder to access, legs shake, responses get emotional rather than rational - it's no longer an asset, instead it becomes a threat in it's own right.
Learning to ride a horse takes years of effort and time but is small fry in comparison to the task of learning to wagon fear. Why didn't evolution dump fear's dark side and just keep the benefits?
I didn't know where to put this, I'd just love to hear what folk think.
What a fascinating question! I don't have any sort of psychological or biological qualifications, but I do wonder whether the answer could at some level involve the abuse over millenia of human fear by social hierarchies.
Having said that, those that know far more will probably say it's purely a chemical matter, an overdose of adrenalin or the like.
A good question indeed. A relevant point might be that in certain circumstances when a predator is near, it is more beneficial to freeze rather than run. This behaviour can be seen in many animals and is clearly instinctive. Perhaps the negative symptons result from being caught half-way between freezing and running? And/or may be the result of the conscious mind clashing with the subconscious automatic freeze/run instinct?
Possibly, but how did such an inbetween state avoid evolution's weeding programme? I was listening yesterday to the radio re the earthquake in Italy and why a guy warning it would happen was stifled using a law built to stop panic spreading; the whole point being when fear isn't controlled we go all lemming-like and cause ourselves more damage!Perhaps the negative symptons result from being caught half-way between freezing and running? And/or may be the result of the conscious mind clashing with the subconscious automatic freeze/run instinct?
I would have thought our early years hunting and being food for other hunters would have whittled away such a precarious, sometimes almost suicidal emotional system.
I did think that perhaps it's because those who mastered fear used their skill and in doing so indulged in a greater number of dangerous persuits, resulting in an early demise. Seems a bit clumsy though.
The fight or flight fear response evolved millions of years ago and still works well for avoiding leopards. Fear of fire and falling also prevent trouble.
But we had to keep growing our brains didn't we. Now we over analyse things and dwell on problems to long and imagine what ifs.
The instinctive fear still works, it's the thinking that causes problems.
That's my guess.
It is also interesting how a perfectly useful survival mechanism such as fear can tip over into phobia.
I wouldn't say I had an actual phobia of horses, I'm just scared of the huge, leggy, toothy things. I can overcome this fear, I have ridden horses, walk through fields of horses and even petted & hand fed horses. Yet sometimes I freeze if I unexpectedly come across a horse. At the Black Country museum recently I couldn't even go into the yard with the horses in. My heart was pounding and I felt sick. I imagine a phobia is being like that with horses (or the subject of your phobia) all the time. There was no reason to fear these horses. A horse being petted by small children is unlikely to be a danger. Yet a totally irrational and useless physical fear reaction took over.
I can understand fear - whether you freeze or run, but not phobias.
I'm not really talking about phobias, although maybe it's more the same than I realise. I'm talking about real fear, life threatening fear.
I was always afraid getting on an unbroken horse, I know it's a life risking thing to do, I have no illusions about how much and how quickly damage can be done to my body by something that bloody big! Most of the time it was helpful, IF I stayed in control of it and didn't let it 'ride' me. I would think that fairly similar to how a hunter may feel spearing a byson - scared to bloody death but still in control of their faculties. BUT there are times when it backfires in a spectacular fashion, when you can't stop your legs shaking, when you make bad decisions, and lose the ability to remain in cognitive control - panic.
OK that's all anecdote but there's enough awareness of the harm panic can do in real life situations such as fires, crashes, shootings or even a man in a van warning there's an earthquake coming. Those situations aren't wildly different from things in the natural world, ie, unexpected and life threatening.
I'm not talking about worry or stress, only acute and debilitating fear in the presence of real danger.
Those fauna capable of experiencing fear followed with certain behaviors, and those that most often lead to survival (fight, freeze, or flight) were passed on genetically, eventually encoding.
Whether a critter chooses fight, freeze, or flight, it feels fear while doing it (fear prompted the selected action).
Fear, like physical pain, can be viewed as an internal 'warning signal' that something is wrong and needs immediate attention.
In humans, interpersonal, cultural, social, etc. developments have occurred far faster than the usual timeline for evolutionary change. Whereas a mouse's fear signal would still be limited pretty much to predator or environmental threats (cold, flood, fire, etc.), human fears are rarely prompted by predators, and are more likely due to more abstract concepts unique to humans like mortgage foreclosure, job loss, marital strife, and, um, anal probing by aliens.
Both a mouse and a human would likely feel fear to see a 500 lb tiger 15 feet away. But only the human might override his instinctive fear by realizing there is a zoo enclosure keeping the tiger at bay. The mouse could not conceive this on first encounter.
By this we see that it is by virtue of how the human mind perceives and interprets perceptions through all the internal biases or lenses of culture, education, etc., that the feeling of fear is or isn't prompted. This is evolutionary, but not coded as instinct in our genes - the human who encounters the tiger at 15 ft, but hasn't the knowledge that the zoo bars keep it at bay, would likely feel fear.
At the same time, our mouse who so rightly feared the tiger at first encounter not being capable of understanding the function of zoo bars, might learn via repetitious contact that he is safe from the tiger up to a certain distance from the tiger, say, the extent to which the tiger can extend a clawed paw through the bars.
Taking a philosophical left turn, I would close with the observation that the mouse ought to've held as its greater fear the human standing next to him 15 ft outside the tiger's cage.
(Grumpy picks up the startled mouse and tosses it into the gaping maw of the tiger.)
Last edited by Grumpy; 10th April 2009 at 06:28 PM.
Thanks for the reply Grumpy - and Hi!
I still get the impression your focus is more on the irrational fears we face where as what I'm asking about are very primal and real fears, such as fire, earthquake and hand to hand struggles with bloody big animals!
I totally buy that phobias may well result from a mismatch between our instincts and our current enviroment, but human beings still face some pretty primal risks.
Some eastern chaps have said that thier is nother to fear but fear its self, sounds good but what about a broken leg or arm, how about a bad burn.
Fear is good it prevents people from getting harmed by doing over confident stunts.
Fear makes people think twice about jumping a ten foot gap with sharpend wooden spikes at the bottom of the fall.
Look at the damage done to themselves by the nuts that try to follow jackass tv stunters.
No we should reconise the fear and understand why we feel it at the time and think it through then jump using a trusty 8 foot whip then let the music play in the back ground and just call me indiana.
Ahh, I misunderstood. I think Floppit is asking about panic.
Yes, fear is useful, but why does it tip over into panic? This is not only not useful, but actively harmful. This, I think, is what the OP is asking.
Having thought about it over the last days I'd like to hear from someone who can tell us the physiological effects of adrenaline. I suspect it's an overdose of that. Perhaps we get enough to make us able to flee, but it's not shut off like a tap, so the excess turns that fear to panic. As a result, it wouldn't matter in a prey-predator situation, because it would have achieved its initial spur to action.
Just as a rider to that, is this why our legs turn to jelly after we've got through a fearful situation?? What we call relief could be no more than the mopping up of adrenaline ...
I'm guessing of course, with no basis in knowledge!
Last edited by DrS; 11th April 2009 at 10:30 AM.
Is there any link between panic and intelligence? I think chimpanzees panic, but do mice?
Could it be that being unable to make a quick/snap decision leads to panic? Perhaps panic is a mind overwhelmed and unable to focus whereas someone in the same situation who dose not panic chooses a course of action and follows it through?
Maybe lower order animals just operate on instinct.
I'm guessing too.
Many of the threats people face now (and have evolved/learned to deal with) come from other people. Assuming someone is in a situation where they know they're unlikely to win a conflict by force, and can't run away (whether because they're not fast enough or because the threat will still be there when they return), actually playing dead isn't generally going to fool an adversary the way it might fool a regular predator, but someone quivering in fear might be giving out a fairly strong "I'm no threat" or "I'm no competition" signal.
Given the particular ability of humans to think ahead, it may partly be a case of people in a stressful situation just getting too caught up in imagining a whole load of possible negative consequences, as Zero mentioned.
In a less-immediate situation, that could be a good thing, since it would enable them to plan ways to avoid those consequences, and so the obvious over-analysis in an actual risk situation could just be a byproduct of a highly adaptive ability to generally avoid being in those risk situations in the first place.
Iif you can avoid 9 out of 10 situations by planning, but the result is that you freeze when you're in the 1 out of 10, you may still be way ahead on average.
Also, if the being-in-danger situations are rare [for an individual], then simply being in an unfamiliar and unpredicted situation can be very disorienting for someone who isn't used to unanticipated situations - someone can get greatly would up by the simple fact that they don't know exactly what to do, and spend time thinking about that rather than trying to work out what they could do.
For a given person, differences in training as to what to expect/do in a fire or earthquake can make a huge amount of difference, even between two people of basically the same temperament.
Interesting exercise in my beloved semantics - fear carries a veriety of aspects. I thought Floppit referred to the manufacturing of fear through social training (this might be hell fires or more commonly today crime or terrorism) largely as a vehicle for social control.
But it would apear not - is then Floppit referring to the stampede - I know little or nothing about animal behaviour but suspect that panic reactions are more akin to this group/herd behaviour?
I can however recommend Dan Gardner's book "The Science & Politics of Fear" - it's popular science writing so not hard to get round. (a reveiw here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...er-801570.html)
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