From decaf coffee, to the total destruction of the world’s climate, fears come in all shapes and sizes, but don’t actually have to be based in reality. Or do they? Today we’re gonna talk about our favorite frightful phobia: the fear of the dark. Cuz, y’know, who isn’t afraid of a little darkness? First up is the story of a 21-year old man who developed a phobia of darkness after serving in the Israeli military. He noted that up until his traumatic experience he felt no emotional reaction to the dark, but after this experience, he could not bring himself to leave his house after dark save for when he was driving or inside of a car. His phobic reactions were so severe that he would even leave events early to ensure that he was on his way home before sunset, and even thinking about darkness would give him bouts of anxiety, where he perspired heavily, gasped for air, trembled, and experienced severe vertigo. These reactions would occur even when he was indoors, and he could not sleep in a dark room even with a night light on. If he could sleep through the effects of medications, he would have “horrifying nightmares”. Because of this, he began a habit of sleeping during the day, and staying awake all night. So… he was a vampire, essentially. Ugh, sounds like a bloody nightmare! Doctors attending to his case noted that isolating specific stimuli to identify a trigger for one’s phobia is difficult, however it was very clear to them that this gentleman’s phobic reactions were most severely caused by darkness itself. The patient justified never sleeping at night as a way to avoid nightmares, which I totally understand— They say coffee has been linked to heart disease in long term use. Most people don’t read the article, they formulate opinions based on headlines. My favourite fish is the Spiny Lumpsucker. Your whole identity is fake, and you live in a Google Drive. Sand!? SAND? Aside from that, any object in darkness could also elicit a fear reaction. Most notably, a group of trees in the darkness was a particular trigger for him. He actually knew that his fear was irrational, but couldn’t control the reaction nonetheless. This is a classic example of chronic nyctophobia, or, an intense fear of the dark. Doctors used desensitization techniques that asked him to confront his fears head-on, in a clinical setting to accomplish what they call “extinction” of the phobia. It was successful, but the patient ended up ending treatment due to prior responsibilities in the military, although after a 6-month follow up, he continued to show complete recovery from his phobia. Now I’m sure that many, if not all of us, have had at one time in our lives been afraid of the dark. If you’re like me you might run from lightswitch to lightswitch when you’re turning off your lights at night to make sure you spend the least amount of time in the dark as possible. But why do we fear the dark in the first place? When it comes to how we learn to fear things, we need to first understand what an unconditioned stimulus and a conditioned stimulus is. An unconditioned stimulus is like being stung by a bee. It’s something that elicits an automatic response. Whereas a conditioned stimulus is like your morning alarm. The sound itself doesn’t mean anything, it’s a neutral stimulus, but you’re conditioned to associate it with having to wake up in the morning. A child who has never been stung by a bee, generally knows that bees are good, and might even have a positive reaction to seeing one. However if they accidentally knock over a beehive, and are stung multiple times they learn to fear bees because they know that they can be stung, and that will hurt. This is what’s called “Classical Conditioning” and you may know it from its most famous proponent, Ivan Pavlov, who developed the theory of classical conditioning with dogs by associating a bell ringing with being fed. In the end, the dogs would salivate even when food was not present, proving that they had come to understand the sound of a bell meant they would be fed. *bell ring* Did somebody say Dashlane? No? I didn’t hear anyone say Dashlane. I just got the sudden urge to talk about how Dashlane makes the slow, annoying, or frustrating parts of using the internet faster and easier! Like how they generate and save passwords for all of our accounts all at once! *bell ring* And I can’t stop thinking about how they’ll even autofill your address and credit card information so you can be in and out of your online shopping with one click! What’s going on with you two? *bell ring* Oh yeah! And Dashlane even encrypts your information locally with a master password you make! So even if Dashlane got hacked, or, like, if someone at Dashlane just happened to get classically conditioned to breach your data at the sound of a bell, there’s nothing to fear! *bell ring* You almost forgot about how Dashlane works across all devices! So even if you get a new phone, all your logins are all ready to go. Boys, please, you’re scaring me. *bell ring* Oh, Chill! Don’t forget the great deal we’re offering! How could I forget! Dashlane is free on your first device at https://www.dashlane.com/brew and when you want to upgrade, get 10% off their premium version for a limited time which you can redeem with the promo code “Brew” And that price tag gets you VPN, Dark Web Monitoring, a password safe, and breach alerts altogether for what any one of them would cost alone! *bell ringing* Whoa, what just happened? I don’t know, but I feel like I just got a sweet deal on something. Potts, we’ve done ads for Dashlane in the past, we love their service. Yeah! They’re super nice to us too! Why would you mess with our minds like that? Because I can, and now you know what I am capable of. Aw Howard, that’s kinda scary, okay? Speaking of scary! Classical and instructional conditioning explains how a child can learn to fear something, either by way of other people telling them to fear a certain thing, or by associating negative experiences with the thing in question. That being said, many children are afraid of the dark despite the relative safety of today’s societies. A child growing up in a developed country is as likely to be afraid of the dark as one growing up in a less stable environment. Researchers believe that many of the fears that seem innate to us can be linked back to our evolutionary past. Arne Öhman of the Karolinska Institute argues that our physical bodies have evolved to address certain facts in our environments. We have lungs to breathe air, eyes to see, teeth that developed to eat both meat and plant materials, and just as our bodies adapted to our environments, so too did our brains. Essentially, the claim is that our behaviors serve and complement biologically useful functions. Our brains over time created “modules” that generate automatic responses to historically dangerous stimuli. Our fear module is constantly taking in information, and outputs a yes or no value. Yes, you should be afraid, or no, you should not be afraid. Although sometimes our fear modules don’t output rational answers to stimuli. For example, humans typically fear spectacular, and statistically unlikely events. According to Maia Szalavitz of Psychology Today, after the 2001 attacks, approximately 1.4 million people chose to change their holiday plans to avoid flying. This however, led to over 1000 more auto fatalities during the holiday season than the year before. Driving a car is significantly more dangerous than flying, yet we do not associate driving with the same threat. Öhman claims that we are more afraid of things like heights, deadly predators, and the dark, than we are of other phenomena that might be more likely to kill us in our contemporary world, like being shot, or traffic accidents. So this suggests that our fear responses are hardwired to evolutionary stimuli. We fear what our ancestors feared, even if they aren’t relevant anymore. So why are we afraid of the dark in particular? A study on lion attacks in Africa found that the majority of instances where a human was eaten by a lion took place in the weeks following a full moon. In fact, they found that lions were significantly less effective at predation on moonlit nights, because, well, their prey could, y’know, see them. The same study also argues that since lions were once the most widely distributed mammal on the planet, and our ancestors often depicted them in great detail in cave paintings as early as 36,000 years ago, it can be inferred that the threat of a lion, or other predator on a dark night would be of the utmost concern to our primal predecessors, which gives us an evolutionary argument as to why a fear of the dark is so universal. Uhh the dark ain’t that scary. If you’re so brave, Grill. Do you think you could get the box labelled “LaserDiscs” from the basement? Pfft, I’m not scared. What’s a little darkness gonna do to me? Ahh! Join us. I’m out of breath. Because I ran up the stairs. By choice. Fears are created in many different ways. We learn to fear things from seeing the danger they pose, but we can also have fears ingrained in us from the experiences of our primal ancestors. The world is a dangerous place, and everything we do has risk. Confronting our fears is as much a show of bravery as having the courage to admit that we’re afraid in the first place. And if you’re anything like me, you’re terrified.
