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I have recently been reading the book "How the Mind Works" by Stephen Pinker. It feels like there are revelations about little facets of the human condition on every page, From why Jews don't eat pork, the purpose of fashion, emotion and marriage to why we like music and art. I'm having a great time reading it and would heartily recommend it to others.

One passage I particularly enjoyed is where Pinker discusses fear. It's not something I had really given much thought to before, but we really are wired up in quite a clever way, as evidenced by how we react to different stimuli:

The psychiatrist Isaac Marks has shown that people react in different ways to different frightening things, each reaction appropriate to the hazard. An animal triggers an urge to flee, but a precipice causes one to freeze. Social threats lead to shyness and gestures of appeasement. People really do faint at the sight of blood, because their blood pressure drops, presumably a response that would minimize the further loss of one's own blood. The best evidence that fears are not just bugs in the nervous system is that animals that have evolved on islands without predators lose their fear and are sitting ducks for any invader--hence the expression dead as a dodo

But can we be scared of anything, or is there some sort of underlying pattern that describes why some things are intrinsically more scary than others? One particularly cruel chap decided to find out:

[the scientist] came up behind an eleven month old boy playing with a tame white rat and suddenly clanged two steel bars together. After a few more clangs, the boy became afraid of the rat and also other white furry things, including rabbits, dogs, a sealskin coat, and Santa Claus

And after trying the same thing out on a whole bunch of other kids, decided that

in fact creatures cannot be conditioned to fear any old thing, children are nervous about rats [...] before any conditioning begins, and they easily associate them with danger. Change the white rat to some arbitrary object, like opera glasses, and the child never learns to fear it. [...] The psychologist Martin Seligman suggests that fears can be easily conditioned only when the animal is evolutionarily prepared to make the association