4 ms·
I wonder why even looking at pictures of giant snakes is unsettling. And cockroaches too.
by markus_zhang 11mo ago
I wonder why even looking at pictures of giant snakes is unsettling. And cockroaches too.
- andai 11mo agoCause your nervous system knows what a snake is but doesn't know what a picture is?
- iberator 11mo agoIt is proven by science that there is no such thing as an intuitive fear of snakes. Its 100% cultural. Toddlers don't fear snakes for example.
- nxpnsv 11mo agoIs culture how cats and cucumbers work?
- fainpul 11mo agoNo, that's how surprise works. As in "Cop scared by mannequin": https://youtu.be/xf1Y2En4fGE?si=2RwRnGBoGHuCNogG&t=416 https://youtu.be/xf1Y2En4fGE?si=2RwRnGBoGHuCNogG&t=416
- suzzer99 11mo agoWhat about spiders?
- abc_lisper 11mo agoReference?
- pavel_lishin 11mo agohttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6716607/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6716607/
- defrost 11mo agoI'm aligned with @iberator here. I grew up with children and people in Northern Australia that had zero fear of snakes and spiders with plenty of exposure to both. When I was 13 a friend of my sister, a large imposing Torres Strait Islander girl, visited and saw a cat for the very first time and screamed fit to break glass while jumping back to break the wall panel and up onto the couch. This was someone comfortable handling large live mud crabs on the floor, gutting fish, handling snakes and killing them, etc.
- csallen 11mo agoI've always found this interesting because nothing about the appearance of a snake has ever bothered me, unsettled me, or made me fearful. They actually look very neat to me, and the tiny snakes I've had the fortune of holding were very fun to feel slithering about in my hands. Cockroaches on the hand, not scary at all, but I feel disgusted by them. And large spiders, extremely scary to me, instant fear response.
- sebmellen 11mo agoIt's the exact same for me. The spiders are by far the most visceral fear response, especially if a gruesomely detailed photo pops up on my phone. Smaller spiders scared me when I was younger, but I have overcome that phobia significantly. Large, hairy, distinctly arthropodic spiders, though...? Yuck.
- anon_cow1111 11mo agoQuestion for both you and GPP; is this fear limited to real life depictions, or basically anything? E.g, if you ever played Skyrim or a game with spider-like enemies does it have the same effect as a real spider? Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.
- hacb 11mo agoI'm also really afraid of snakes, but spiders are okay. Movies with snakes are quite painful to watch too, and I'm very uncomfortable with snakes in video games, but at least I have some control (compared to TV) so it's a significantly better experience
- t-3 11mo agoSpider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary. I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.
- meindnoch 11mo agoI'm not unsettled by them.
- 47282847 11mo agoThere is the theory that a substantive percentage of people have dangerous prenatal experiences with their umbilical chord, as the source of their fear of snakes, and that it can be resolved later in life with regressive therapy. See e.g. ”Womb Surround” by Ray Castellino.
- pavel_lishin 11mo agoWouldn't those people also be afraid of ropes, cables, etc?
- 47282847 11mo agoI think the idea is that an umbilical cord is experienced as “alive” whereas ropes are just “dead items”, something that in early years may trigger the original fear responses but gets integrated more easily.