Where does fear actually come from?
Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment. Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.But what...