Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Hotheads | 387scrutiny, and of leaving home respond to different kinds of drugs, suggestingthat they are computed by different brain circuits. The psychiatristIsaac Marks has shown that people react in different ways todifferent frightening things, each reaction appropriate to the hazard. Ananimal triggers an urge to flee, but a precipice causes one to freeze.Social threats lead to shyness and gestures of appeasement. People reallydo faint at the sight of blood, because their blood pressure drops, presumablya response that would minimize the further loss of one's ownblood. The best evidence that fears are adaptations and not just bugs inthe nervous system is that animals that have evolved on islands withoutpredators lose their fear and are sitting ducks for any invader—hence theexpression "dead as a dodo."Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longerexist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. Weought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighterfluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs, not of snakes and spiders. Publicsafety officials try to strike fear in the hearts of citizens using everythingfrom statistics to shocking photographs, usually to no avail. Parentsscream and punish to deter their children from playing with matches orchasing a ball into the street, but when Chicago schoolchildren wereasked what they were most afraid of, they cited lions, tigers, and snakes,unlikely hazards in the Windy City.Of course, fears do change with experience. For decades psychologiststhought that animals learn new fears the way Pavlov's dogs learnedto salivate to a bell. In a famous experiment, John B. Watson, thefounder of behaviorism, came up behind an eleven-month-old boy playingwith a tame white rat and suddenly clanged two steel bars together.After a few more clangs, the boy became afraid of the rat and other whitefurry things, including rabbits, dogs, a sealskin coat, and Santa Claus.The rat, too, can learn to associate danger with a previously neutral stimulus.A rat shocked in a white room will flee it for a black room everytime it is dumped there, long after the shocker has been unplugged.But in fact creatures cannot be conditioned to fear just any old thing.Children are nervous about rats, and rats are nervous about brightrooms, before any conditioning begins, and they easily associate themwith danger. Change the white rat to some arbitrary object, like operaglasses, and the child never learns to fear it. Shock the rat in a blackroom instead of a white one, and that nocturnal creature learns the associationmore slowly and unlearns it more quickly. The psychologist Mar-