How Fear Works

Having listened to the podcast about fear (Stuff You Should Know, N 36), I have come up with interesting ideas on what fear is, how it works, whether it is an inherent emotion or not, and also some interesting examples from history referring to fear.

According to the Online Webster Dictionary, fear is "an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger and accompanied by increased autonomic activity". In other words, when you are afraid of something certain chain reactions take place in your brain that lead to an autonomic response.Nervous scientists distinguish between two types of responses:a low road response and a high road response. In the process of fearing these two responses take place at the same time.A low road response is a quick response, and sometimes, as the speaker in the podcast states, it can be a false response.The high road response takes longer and it allows much more thoughtful analysis of the situation. Let's imagine the following situation; a man is sitting on the sofa and is watching TV. Suddenly. the door starts rattling.First the low road response takes place, and the man starts to fear. At the same time, the high road response is being activated by the brain, and it engages the memory to analyse the situation.He switches on his memory trying to find out if anything similar has happened to him before.And he comes to the idea that it is probably the wind.This thought makes him calm down.

Fear is similar to other emotions that the humans possess, such as anger, joy, disgust, sadness. And I would like to point out to an interesting fact; fear, as well as the other emotions, is survival motivator.For example, the speaker in the podcast goes back to the history and analyses the following situation; two cave men are sitting and talking. Suddenly they see a snake. One of them touches it. As a result he is bitten by the snake and dies. Next time, the other man, seeing a snake, becomes scared as the case with his friend showed that snakes might be very dangerous.So,If you fear the right things, such as snakes, lightening, spiders, you have more chances to survive and you will become wiser. In this way the man develops his fear memory which he passes down to his next generations.

Darwin was the first scientist suggesting that fear can be an inherent emotion.He came to this idea when he was once attacked by a snake in the Zoo. Although the snake was behind the glass, he was very scared. Besides, Darwin had never been bitten by a snake before.This example illustrates that fear is an inherent emotion. 

Another interesting point about fear is that we can anticipate being afraid. We don't have to be bitten by each new snake to fear them all.We can anticipate that all of them can bite us. Thus, we are afraid of snakes in general. Or, a person might be scared of the plane being crashed even if he has never flown before.

Also, fear can be conditioned. One can teach somebody being afraid of something or not being afraid of something. 
There are different types of fear that are named differently: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, sociophobia. And I have also heard of an unusual type of fear called phobophobia (when a person is afraid of being afraid).