Cal Lanouette
Sports Editor
Ghosts. Spiders. Snakes. Heights. Death. Darkness. Clowns. These are just a few of the top things that scare people in the. Everyone has some sort of fear, but what really scares people?
Senior Oliver Osburn said he is scared of spiders.
Senior Alexis Burke said she was scared of someone breaking into her house when she’s home alone and kidnapping her.
“There wasn’t a definitive moment that made me scared of spiders,” said Osburn. “I just don’t like how they’re small and fast and have so many legs.”
According to Julia Layton, a writer for howstuffworks.com, fear is mental and is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals. It’s the fight or flight concept.
Fear deals with five parts of the brain: the thalamus, sensory cortex, hippocampus, amygdala and hypothalamus.
The thalamus decides where to send incoming sensory data. The sensory cortex interprets this data. The hippocampus stores and retrieves conscious memories. The amygdala decodes emotions and determines possible threats. The hypothalamus is what activates the fight or flight response.
Psychology teacher Jon Petter said, “An underdeveloped or overdeveloped amygdala can affect how a person responds to fear.”
It is now October when most of people’s fears come to life. According to livescience.com, facing our fears could be a way to treat our phobias.
This isn’t true for all of them; however, for fears like sleeping in the dark or heights, for example, if one sleeps in the dark and continues to do so or a person were to do more things that involve heights like rock climbing, they might eventually “cure” their phobia.
Some people enjoy fear, and these people are the haunted house and horror movie junkies.
“I love the rush you get when watching a scary movie,” said Burke. “I’m probably one to watch any scary movie, except ones with lots of gore. That stuff is gross.”
According to livescience.com, if the brain knows there is no risk of really being harmed, it experiences this adrenaline rush as enjoyable.
