Science
The Role of Fear in My Life
Exposed skin. I step onto the stage and reveal to the audience myself. Here is my expression, my art. If it didn’t scare me, it would be easy and it wouldn’t be worth it. The pieces I choose to do are about me and my life. They are more than just the “razzle dazzle” of the glitter and lights. My acts are about my struggles to face my fears and overcome them. To show the love I have for myself and share myself with an intimate crowd of about 300 people. I would not have it any other way. I face my fears so others can follow in my footsteps and feel as free to love and express themselves. Each step I take as the owner/director of Pasties & Paddles and as a performance artist has an element of fear. Yet in facing risk and doubt and then overcoming it, I get that much stronger. So just remember when you walk onto the stage of life, you have the power to choose how you handle yourself. The real question will be: Will you let fear control you or will you face it and make something beautiful? — DIVINE JEWELS Burlesque performer, Pasties & Paddles
What Scares Me
My parents did right in raising me — they told me not to take candy from strangers and not to ride my bike without a helmet. But one mistake they thought they made in parenting resulted in one of the most dominant, yet rational fears I developed in my younger years: that humans can be more frightening than apparitions or monsters. When I watched The Godfather for the first time at a notably young age, when I first laid eyes on Don Corleone, fat-lipped and sinister, I came to this important realization. Since witnessing the corruption and mercilessness in that particular film, I couldn’t help but start to look twice at men in pinstripe suits and to look over my shoulder when walking alone at night. Spokane is not exactly a Mecca for organized crime, and an innocent girl like me is not exactly the type to do wrong by the mob, but the possibility of irrational human thought causing vengeful, bloody crime scares me nonetheless. My perspective on the world changed to encompass this newfangled fear of my own species, one that still haunts me from the film reels of the nightly news. — KATE DINNISON A senior at Spokane’s Lewis & Clark High School
This is Your Brain
A little almond-shaped cluster deep in the brain can make us afraid — or fearless
T
o better understand the nature of fear, University of Washington professor Jeansok Kim used a robotic alligator. Constructed entirely out of LEGO Mindstorms blocks, the “Robogator” has teeth made of bright orange dagger-like LEGOS and a swaying gray tail. It sits still, waiting for its prey. That’s when a rat peeks his head through a tiny door, sniffs around and heads for a pellet. The Robogator moves, lunges forward, snapping its little robotic jaws. The rat dashes away. The rat has experienced fear. And that’s healthy. “What’s surprising about fears is how the fear response in rats highly resembles the human condition,” Kim says. When a rat is scared, it either freezes, hopefully preventing a predator from seeing it, or runs away. Just like how a person tenses up watching a scary movie, and then yelps and jumps if you come up behind and suddenly place your hand on their neck. Fear in humans, rats and most other animals is deep-seated — all tied in up in self-perseveration, inhibition and millions of years of evolutionary changes. At its most basic, only two things matter in evolution: survival and reproduction. Fear is all about the former. “It’s not good to not be afraid,” says Anna Marie Medina, associate professor of psychology at Gonzaga University. “If we weren’t afraid, we would be walking up to predators before we had children.” One study, from the September 2001 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows that humans identified scary images — snakes and spiders — far faster than identifying mushrooms and flowers. The co-author of the study, Arne Öhman, speculates in National Geographic that it’s because that instinct might go back to early mammals millions of years ago when the world was dominated by reptiles. The challenge in drawing conclusions from that, other researchers say, is that the fossil record, by its very nature, can say very little about how brains perceived danger eons ago. But with respect to the modern mind, scientists have figured out quite a bit.
“We know what brain structure controls fear,” Kim says. It’s called the amygdala, a tiny almond-shaped cluster deep in the base of the brain, and it reacts to fear, hunger and even empathy. The amygdala evolved in primitive brains long before much of the rest of the brain, yet still has a powerful sway. That cluster sends far more neurons to the more “rational” parts of the brain than it receives, research has revealed. It’s why it’s so hard to talk yourself out of a silly fear, despite reading all of the statistics and understanding all of the logic. “You’re sweating, as you try to jump off the diving board,” says Medina. “You’re getting a lot more information [from the amygdala] so your body is having that fear response.” In Kim’s experiment, the healthy rat gauges how close the Robogator is before deciding to blitz out for a pellet. If it’s too close, the rat won’t make a move at all. But a funny thing happens to a rat with a damaged amygdala: It takes dumb risks. The Robogator lunges, bites threateningly, but the rat keeps moving forward, practically touching the machine with the rat’s nose. Research has shown similar behavior in humans. One study examined two women with lesions on their amygdala and found they were willing to gamble much more readily — even if the benefits were small — than those with a healthy brain. “Maybe people who have a gambling problem have no fear of losing,” Kim says. Humans with a damaged amygdala have trouble even detecting the fearful faces of others. Other research has shown that an overactive amygdala can be just as deadly. In Kim’s experiment, the rat with an amygdala stimulated by a drug injection wouldn’t venture out at all when he knows the Robogator is lurking — even if he was hungry. Humans, of course, don’t have to worry about the mighty Robogator, but there are other dangers lurking in the world. “I’m not going to walk down East Sprague at 2 am in the morning by myself. I would be afraid to do that,” Medina says. “It’s good that I’m afraid to do that.” — DANIEL WALTERS
JANUARY 3, 2013 INLANDER 21