Mike Corey Instagram – Let me tell you something that may change your life.
Terrified is your default factory setting. Your fear and anxiety are not unique. You were born screaming & crying. You were born afraid.
For a long time scientists didn’t think this was true. They thought fear was learned, that it was nurture over nature. They thought that our fears were socio-cultural. That fear was taught. You saw your mother scream at a mouse, and then you did too. That all changed when we started showing tarantulas to babies.
Well… pictures of tarantulas, and snakes too. Creatures that would have been ancestral threats to us primates. Dangers from a long time ago.
6 month old babies who had never laid eyes on these creatures before, were shown blurry photos of snakes and spiders mixed with fish and flowers. Infrared trackers measured dilations in their pupils as these images slowly came into focus. Norepinephrine, one of the hormones in your body which controls your fight or flight response, dilates your pupils in response to danger. For the images snakes and spiders, that’s exactly what happened.
These studies have also been conducted even more dramatically with animals. Despite not being exposed to a cat for hundreds of generations, laboratory mice still show fear when exposed to the scent of the predator.
What does this mean? It means we are not a blank slate when we are born. It means that there is ancestral knowledge preprogrammed into our brains at birth. That the wisdom of our ancestors
is still locked inside of us. The tools they used to survive, and all the fears that kept them alive.
As tribal primates, highly dependant on status and social systems for survival… What else are we born afraid of? Ostracisation? Rejection? Judgment? God… No wonder people these days have phobias of public speaking, and social anxiety.
What else could be preprogrammed into our brain at birth? Food for thought 🐉 | Posted on 15/Apr/2023 01:47:39
