Visit theallusionist.org/phobia to listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, valiantly remove a spider from language’s bathtub so language can go in and brush its teeth.
Today’s episode is about phobias, and thus I must issue a content warning: we’re not trying to stoke anyone’s phobias, but we do discuss some common phobia-inducers, including snakes, germs and small holes, and there’s a brief mention of tarantulas. There’s also some talk about OCD and rabies.
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On with the show.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: I'm Deboki Chakravarti; I'm one of the co-hosts of Tiny Matters, where we like to talk about the big science of small things.
SAM JONES: Yes. And I'm Sam Jones. I am the other host of Tiny Matters.
HZ: And united, we are Tiny Matterlusionist.
SAM JONES: Nice. I love that.
HZ: Do either of you have what you would describe as a phobia?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Absolutely. I am not a fan… Well, okay. I wouldn't say I'm not a fan of snakes. I respect them greatly, and as a result, I'm also terrified of them.
HZ: I’m sure they appreciate the respect.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: It helps me keep my distance, which I think we all want.
HZ: OK, Deboki has snakes; Sam, do you have any phobis?
SAM JONES: Let's see… I actually – as a kid I developed like a pretty intense germophobia, that was definitely linked to OCD and all of these other things. Yeah, I'm a diagnosed OCD person, but it came through in me being really afraid of contamination and germs. And it's interesting – I have a deep fascination and also, I think, appreciation for disease and pestilence. But I think a lot of it comes from this obsession when I was a child.
HZ: I like that you both have appreciation for the things that stoke the phobia.
SAM JONES: Yeah. I have a PhD in biomedical science, and I would say that a big reason that I went into the sciences was because I had this anxiety, this phobia, that just shaped a lot of my childhood – mostly not in the best way, but ultimately I think it drove me in a direction where I just wanted to understand as much as I possibly could about the things that terrified me.
HZ: Do you feel the same about snakes, Deboki?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, I have this really vivid memory of this snake book that my best friend in first grade and I would both read. And she went on to become like a total reptile person. She’s always posting about reptiles. I think she does wildlife work, basically. And then I went in the total opposite direction. I took a trip to Australia a while ago, and made sure my suitcases were always shut because I was like so paranoid that like a snake was gonna crawl into this suitcase.
HZ: Did you encounter any snakes?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: My husband saw a snake at a distance and tried to nudge me in a different direction so that I didn't see it. And so I did not see it, but I know that it was there because of how he attempted to help me out.
HZ: if I have anything that I would describe as a phobia – and I do have a sort of full body anxious reaction about it – it is audience participation. If I'm in an audience of anything, I want to be invisible and inert. And if there's any prospect of being involved in the performance, I'm just silently going out my mind.
SAM JONES: Wow. Okay.
HZ: Which people can't believe because I do stage performance myself all the time; but that's different. You are safe. You know what's gonna happen when you are the one making other people do it.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Have you been in that situation?
HZ: I just remember when I was really little – because Britain has the pantomime theatrical tradition, which typically involves getting some kids out of the audience, they do something silly on stage and then they get some candy or whatever. And I was like, "Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, not me, not me, not me. Can we go, can we go?"
SAM JONES: Huh.
HZ: But it makes no real sense; it's not like I have been abjectly humiliated on stage. So maybe it's a control thing. You're like, “Someone else is going to make me do things that make me look like a fool!” And if I look like a fool, I want it to be by my own hand.
SAM JONES: That’s what's so interesting about phobias generally, there doesn't always need to be a reason.
HZ: No. No. And yet, here we are. What is the government name for the fear of snakes?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Ophidiophobia.
HZ: Greek for snake fear.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Or ophiophobia.
HZ: Do you feel like there's any use to having a word that is not that intuitive if you don't speak Greek?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: I mean, now that I know it, I feel like it's a great way to explain myself to people. Telling people I’m afraid of snakes, people are like, “Yeah, but, so is half the world; there are so many people who are afraid of snakes.” But if I can tell people that I've got ophidiophobia, like I feel like that sounds elevated. I sound elegant. I sound –
SAM JONES: You sound diagnosed, you sound diagnosed.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, that too.
HZ: Other people have just got a sparkling fear.
HZ: Outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5, criteria for a phobia include: symptoms that persist for more than six months, they can’t be attributed to another cause – which might rule out Sam’s germophobia if it arose because of her OCD – and the phobia should cause significant distress and impact on one’s life.
Phobias as psychological conditions have been recognised and written about for more than a thousand years, but only started being named as such in a humorous text from 1786.
HZ: I was very interested to learn that one of the founding fathers of things being called phobias was one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Rush. It's him who is attributed with the trend of putting -phobia on the end of things, and also -mania. And he described it as: "I shall define phobia to be a fear of an imaginary evil or an undue fear of a real one." Which I suppose is quite a neat definition. Do you feel like it's fair?
SAM JONES: I think so. Deboki, I don't think you've had any wild experiences with snakes, like an undue fear of a real one. Some snakes are very deadly and dangerous; it's a real threat – but it's an undue fear, I guess you would say in your case. Right?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, I mean, I think the same way with germs too: obviously a germ can kill you. It is a thing that can cause a lot of harm. We have gone through that collectively as well. So it makes sense, especially coming out of COVID, for people to come out of it with like a level of anxiety around just any kind of contagion.
SAM JONES: That's the tricky thing: what is reasonable?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Right. Defining that.
HZ: Yes, because in thought they are all very justifiable, because germs and snakes are capable of killing you, as is a scary clown – as is audience participation, probably. Shame can be fatal.
SAM JONES: Death due to audience participation.
HZ: Very common.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: I mean, you could embarrass yourself on stage. It is a thing that could happen.
HZ: Yes, I could embarrass myself to death on stage at someone else's behest. That's thought-provoking, isn't it? I think when Benjamin Rush was first writing about them, he was being quite tongue in cheek about it. And he listed 18 of them, but a lot of them were kind of funny ones, like wantphobia, he said, “is confined to old people,” but he didn't really explain. Solophobia is the dread of being alone. "This distemper is peculiar to people with vacant minds and guilty consciences." So, I think he's slightly messing around, but he does also mention some real ones like thunderphobia. He's not calling them with two Greek elements yet, it's the English word with -phobia on the end and water phobia, which he says, "not the dread of swallowing, but of crossing water. Peter the Great had this disease in early life."
SAM JONES: Interesting.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Wow.
HZ: But then he does admit that a variety of waterphobia is an aversion to drinking water "without similar dislike to artificial liquids."
SAM JONES: Like wine? He's saying wine's cool?
HZ: Yeah: wine; 7 Up...
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Do you know what inspired him to make this list? Was he struck by some specific need to document phobias? Was he just encountering this? Do we know?
HZ: He was very, very interested in medicine. He was into some quite extreme treatments: apparently he was so into bloodletting that he may have hastened the deaths of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.
SAM JONES: Oh my gosh, yes, I think that's how I knew about this guy.
HZ: Really?
SAM JONES: I think that is the context for me, which is on brand for me to have that be how I know it.
HZ: You know, if Lin-Manuel Miranda had taken the biography of a different founding father on vacation that time, the musical we would've got would have been so different.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: The bloodletting rap.
SAM JONES: Oh my gosh.
HZ: But I think he was being funny, but with the tinge of reality because he does correctly define what it is. So maybe he was just curious about it, but wanted to have a good time in the writing.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. I also love that he describes solo-phobia as both “vacant mind and guilty conscience”, because to me, those are mutually exclusive. When I have a guilty conscience, my mind is full. It is not empty at all.
SAM JONES: Right, right.
HZ: Well, maybe his sample group had range.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Fair enough. Yeah.
SAM JONES: There you go.
HZ: And then he never used the suffix -phobia again after writing this thing in 1786. But other people did because I think people found it useful to be able to describe things with -phobia and -mania. because I guess it is useful.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. As a person who is afraid of a lot of things, it is helpful to be able to categorise them.
SAM JONES: I think there's a maybe some sort of community element for some of these things, where it's like, "I'm not alone in this. There's a name for it, and other people have it." But I also think that it can be overused. Like someone can say, "I have a phobia of this thing" – do they? Or is it just, “I don't like it”? Somebody who actually really, really struggles with, let's say, agoraphobia or something, like cannot leave their house, is really, really, you know – like if someone just lightly was saying like, “Oh yeah, I'm like, I've got agoraphobia,” I would imagine somebody who really struggles is like, “Actually, do you? Because you were just out with your friends at a bar, so I don't know about that.”
HZ: Peruse the Allusionist vault to find the Mind My Mind episode, which is a discussion about mental health terms being used colloquially and/or hyperbolically.
SAM JONES: I come across that a lot, where people will say, “I have such OCD,” and in my mind I'm like, no. Like I have diagnosed – I'm on meds for OCD, like I really have OCD. But it’s fine, whatever.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: I also wonder about that, like in my use of the word 'claustrophobic'. The other day, we were talking about the idea that being in a submarine under the ocean would feel claustrophobic. Obviously I don't mean that in the full phobia sense of it being a condition, but I also just feel like grammatically I'm using it wrong, the idea of describing an experience as claustrophobic versus describing myself as claustrophobic. That always strikes me. But I still also have yet to figure out how to describe why that kind of situation is so unappealing except to use ‘claustrophobic; in that way.
HZ: That's so interesting, what you point out about it being something within you rather than in the circumstance. But then if snakes didn't exist, you wouldn't have to fear them. So maybe it is the world.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: It may be.
HZ: I guess the fact that it's so easy to create new ones just by putting -phobia on the end of a word is quite unhelpful for the ones where it really affects your life and provokes strong emotional or physical reaction, and then you have people coining ones like aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes.
SAM JONES: Never heard of that one.
HZ: Because no one has that, do they? Or hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, the fear of long words. Shut up. Shut. Up. You’re wasting everyone’s time.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Someone came up with that for fun.
HZ: Exactly. They came up with it for fun, but that then makes all the other phobias seem a bit more trivial in a way that I think is unfair if you have one.
SAM JONES: Yeah, agreed.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: It reminds me of the way that now everything controversial and scandalous is '-gate', it levels all potential scandals to like the same level as each other.
HZ: Hear all about that in my episode about the -gate suffix for scandals, from Pizzagate to Piggate.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Anything that you can put -gate at the end of is like now all, like, they're all treated the same, and that's not what's happening. There's a difference between the phobias you're coming up with for fun and the phobias that are affecting people's lives.
SAM JONES: Yeah.
HZ: But clinically, the trend seems to be more moving towards using anxiety terms rather than phobia.
SAM JONES: The DSM-5 does classify specific phobias as types of anxiety disorders, like phobias fall under anxiety.
HZ: After Benjamin Rush started the trend in the late 1700s, more words were created with the phobia suffix over the following century, and by the late 19th century, ‘phobia’ was largely used to mean fears; but before that sense really became dominant, a pretty common use of the word was for diseases.
SAM JONES: Rabies was historically known as hydrophobia. And the reason is that people with rabies, late stage rabies, you're-about-to-die rabies, are averse to water. Rabies spreads through bites or scratches from infected animals. Ultimately within weeks to potentially months, people will start to hallucinate. They'll also have aggression. They'll try to bite. They'll have convulsions, they'll have this hydrophobia. And that's because the virus that causes rabies causes inflammation to the brain, and that will trigger really painful muscle spasms in your throat and larynx, so if you try to drink, you start to kind of like choke on the water, spit it up. This makes it seem like people are afraid of water, IE hydrophobia; but they're not actually afraid of water. They just can't drink it.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, it's like a physiological reaction to the water – not a fear; they can’t drink it.
SAM JONES: Right, exactly. People who are actually afraid of water, that's classified as aquaphobia.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: That's so interesting that they had to come up with a whole separate word for an actual fear of water because they had like already used up hydrophobia on rabies.
SAM JONES: Right. Yeah.
HZ: They'd also had aerophobia for rabies, because the cold air would upset people, and pantophobia, fear of all things. Which is maybe too general to be useful.
SAM JONES: Yeah. But essentially the virus that causes rabies, it's actually a number of viruses and they're in the family Rhabdoviridae and genus Lyssavirus. And so for context actually, Lyssa is a goddess of rage or madness in Greece.
HZ: Lyssophobia is also variously the fear of rabies and the fear of becoming insane, and in the late 19th century there were some satirical uses of the term to mean a senseless panic stoked in the public imagination by the press. There were also a few instances of both lyssophobia and lyssomania being used as a term for fear of the idea of water.
Incidentally, the goddess Lyssa is often conflated or confused with Mania, the mythological personification of madness, sometimes depicted as a collection of persons, sometimes just one; and both Mania and Lyssa are cast as daughters of Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and Lyssa’s father in some tellings is Uranus, which adds complication because Nyx is sometimes the mother of Uranus. Hear more about him in the Uranus episode.
Lyssa, whose name derives from a word meaning 'wolf', is sometimes depicted as taking vengeance on deities by inflicting insanity upon them. She is also credited with punishing Actaeon – who had been turned into a stag for spying on the goddess Artemis – by infecting his dogs with rabies so they ripped him to bits. That's the rabies connection.
SAM JONES: Obviously rabies was not a term when this goddess of rage or madness came about, but there was an understanding that like, you could be bit by an animal and go mad.
HZ: The disease was identified and written about more than 4000 years ago, and has been known as 'rabies' in English since at least the late 16th century. Prior to that, 'rabies' meant madness or fury, which is what its Latin root word 'rabies' means - this was also the root of the word 'rage', which has been in English for around 700 years meaning mostly what it still means now, but with a 15th century sidequest to mean a burst of sexual desire.
Hydrophobia, the inability to drink water that was interpreted as an aversion and named as a phobia, is now more used to suggest fear of water separate from rabies; and there’s also the chemistry sense of hydrophobe, something that repels water. Which is evocative of the earlier meaning of the ancient Greek word ‘phobos’ that begat ‘phobia’: even earlier than it meant fear, and earlier than it was the name of the lion-headed Greek god of fear, it meant fleeing.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Interesting.
HZ: Which is kind of expressive of the feeling that it gives. But there are lots of ways in which the word ‘phobia’ doesn’t mean fear, and particularly when it's words for bigotries like xenophobia or homophobia – I mean, call it what it is: it's anti-gay bigotry. Although 'homophobia' did originate as fear of humans. I think that was in use in the early 1900s, but I think they were like, if a horse bolts because it's afraid of humans, that's homophobia.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Do you know when it made the switch?
HZ: I think in the late 1960s, because anti-gay sentiment had become very strong at that point.
SAM JONES: Right. Yeah. Hiding behind ‘phobia’ makes it seem like it's like a legitimate fear when actually it's something very different.
HZ: And you are the victim.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Well, are homophobic people using it as a defence? They're using fear as a defence, but they're not calling themselves homophobic, at least that I've seen.
SAM JONES: Yeah, I've never heard someone label themself as homophobic or xenophobic.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: And if anything, there’s sometimes an attempt at plausible deniability of saying like, “I'm just asking questions,” or “I'm just worried about the children” – the weird kind of insidiousness there where they are using fear, definitely fearmongering is part of the technique there, but not labelling themselves as being a homophobic person or a transphobic person or xenophobic. Like it's, “No, this is just the way the world is.”
HZ: That is a point I hadn't thought of, Deboki, and I think it's a good one when thinking about, say the press and if they say ‘transphobia’, they're sort of like, well, we can identify the thing, but we're not doing anything to help it. and they're not comfortable labelling it ‘anti-trans bigotry’, or ‘anti-Islamic racism’ instead of Islamophobia, and things like that. So maybe it is people who think they don't do the thing, but are describing the thing in a way that makes it seem milder than it is.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. I hadn't thought about like using ‘phobia’ as a softening of other people's bigotry, but it feels like a big part of what happens there.
HZ: Like, “Oh, I'm a little scared and I have to stand on a chair, like the woman in Tom and Jerry.”
SAM JONES: Yeah. I think that maybe labelling of people that way and saying they're homophobic or xenophobic versus just straight up saying like, “This person is racist and is targeting people who are not white,” or something, it puts a little glaze over what's actually happening, maybe.
HZ: Ah, fun. This is what I do with language. Just make it less fun.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: No, I think it's like actually really helpful, thinking about how I think of our use of the word phobia – just how we use it in ways that maybe are not just about labelling things as fears, but about softening other people's behaviour.
HZ: Maybe we need a flow chart. Are you thinking of naming something a phobia? Is it just a mild aversion? Is it bigotry in a wig? Is it is it anxiety? Okay, proceed.
Is it okay for you to talk about these things and name these things? Because I have spoken with people in the past, I had to interview people for a daytime TV show in 2005 where they were gonna hypnotise someone to get their phobia reduced, and some of them couldn't name it and one of them puked even just thinking about it. So really sorry if this conversation provokes anything like that.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: No, no, it’s okay. I have had the thought that I don't want to talk about being afraid of snakes in public in case I develop a nemesis who uses it against me, but I have chosen to treat that as an irrational fear as well.
HZ: I don't know – nemeses with snake access could be lurking around every corner.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Could be.
HZ: One of the people I interviewed was a guy who his fear was inflated things, and he used to be in the Navy and he was like, "People knew about it, and I'd wake up with my bed just like covered in balloons."
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Oh no.
HZ: Don't do that, people, it's not nice. I know that exposure is one of the therapies, but that's got to be with consent.
SAM JONES: Yeah, it can't be “ha ha ha” exposure therapy, it has to be real exposure therapy.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. Part of the point of exposure therapy is the safety of the situation, and so throwing someone unsuspectedly into that situation is not creating the sense of security that you need for it to be exposure therapy.
SAM JONES: Right.
HZ: I wouldn't think, "I'll just throw Deboki into a snake pit, then things will be AOK." It'd be more like, let's learn some things about snakes that make them seem less intimidating.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Exactly.
SAM JONES: I have talked with someone about exposure therapy for germophobia before though.
HZ: What do they do?
SAM JONES: There is a lab that really focuses on exposure therapies, and many of them are related to germophobia because it's one of the biggest phobias. And so they'll do things – in a controlled setting, a lab setting, but they'll do things like touching a toilet seat, doorknobs, or some other stuff that's just like, this is definitely teeming with germs. I'm freaking out right now, but like, seeing, okay, nothing's happening to you immediately. So yeah, just kind of exposing people slowly to that.
HZ: Do either of you happen to know how effective getting treatment is?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: In terms of treatment, it varies a lot because phobias vary so much in terms of how they present, how they're best approached, what level of understanding we even have of them.
SAM JONES: For me, an SSRI was life changing, like game changing. And for a lot of people that's the case, but again, for other people it isn't. Every person's experience with a phobia is different and what's causing that phobia might vary. With a lot of phobias, there's an underlying reason that someone might have that. For me, with germophobia, ultimately the underlying reason is that I have OCD and it's manifesting as germophobia. So handling the OCD actually handles the germophobia. And so how do we approach treating the OCD and to what degree do we treat it?
That's another thing that's really fascinating to me. I had a lot of anxiety surrounding going on any sort of medication for OCD because I think that in a weird way, my OCD makes me who I am. My OCD doesn't manifest as like turning off and on a light switch a million times or double checking a lock, it's all internal. Like people wouldn't necessarily have any idea that I'm dealing with that or struggling with that.
So yeah, I was like very anxious in a way about getting treated for the OCD, but as soon as I was getting treatment, I immediately noticed an effect on my phobia, and just my overall anxiety levels and how I was responding to situations and feeling a lot more at ease just existing in the world, which is really – it's awesome. I remember turning to my husband and being like, "Is this what it's like for you?"
HZ: I gather it's under-reported, phobia. I think they estimate at least one in 10 women, and one in 20 men – and women might have disproportionately more because they're expected to have phobias on behalf of children in a way that men are not, also are dealing with more so hostile social environment. I don't think this research breaks down into whether this pertains across like transness and non-binary. But that's roughly the stats people are working off.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: One of the other aspects that I'm so curious about, and I don't have an answer, but: I wonder like how much of our framing of phobias is also social. Going back to the idea of an undue response to a real issue: how do we gauge that undue response? Obviously there's the extent to which the person is having a reaction that's really debilitating for them. But also, and maybe this would go to the question of maybe why women might have more phobias than men, it's like: how do we also treat that fear? How do we like collectively respond to that fear? Like what are we treating as irrational?
HZ: There is some suggestion that certain fears are community-led. Like when John Wayne Gacy's case was big news, a lot more people were claiming coulrophobia, the fear of clowns.
SAM JONES: Yeah. That would make sense.
HZ: Sort of, but it should more be fear of –
SAM JONES: Serial killer clowns?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah.
SAM JONES: Or just serial killers.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: There are probably more shows about serial killers than about clowns, in part because people are fascinated by serial killers. But also there's the cultural element now of clowns being perceived as scary.
HZ: Talking about the social thing though: I was reading a book by Kate Summerscale about phobias and she talks about experiments at the Wisconsin Primate Research Centre in the 1980s and 1990s where they showed monkeys that had been raised in a lab, films of other monkeys reacting to snakes with fear. And so once the monkeys had seen that video, they were afraid of snakes as well, whereas before, they were not fussed. But then when they were shown videos of monkeys being scared of flowers, they didn't acquire flower fear. Now I kind of want a bit more information to drill into like what else might have been happening. But as a broad brush, maybe snakes are scarier than flowers, Deboki.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Well wait, so they were shown pictures of monkeys being afraid of flowers, but they didn't develop the fear of flowers?
HZ: Right.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: In one of the, the phobias I was researching is that there was sort of like a family component to it. And so I was wondering like how much of that is what's going on of us learning our phobias from other people. Like I know some of my own – I also at one point had an OCD diagnosis, and was rooted in behaviours of checking like switches and stuff over and over again.
And like it was always hard for me to untangle how much of that was a behaviour that I had learned from my family versus something that was my own personal issue to develop. But yeah, so I was wondering to what extent these experiments are showing that our phobias are such a learned behaviour or a learned response, versus – but it seems if it's like the flowers they're not afraid of and the snakes are, there's something about snakes that does have something more susceptible to it.
HZ: Snakes do have more teeth than flowers usually have. But they showed them also videos of monkeys being scared by rabbits, and you wonder what the rabbits had done to the monkeys so they could get that video footage.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah.
HZ: Another of the phobias that could be social, or, could have existed for ages but is easier to note as A Thing when you know it to be a thing and to have a name, is trypophobia, an aversion to small holes that appear in clusters or repetitive patterns. The word 'trypophobia' is attributed to an online comment from an anonymous forum user in Ireland in 2005.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: And people became aware of it more recently because it's been in the news more especially, I guess. I personally don't have experience with this on my end, but my husband actually experiences this. and so we realised this because for the same reason that I think other people have realised this is because in the past decade or so, a common source was like people realising they don't like all of the tiny little camera lenses on smartphones.
HZ: I remember that when one came out with like five of them and people were displeased.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. I was asking my husband to kind of describe his symptoms and like what it is he doesn't like. His face and his arms feel really fuzzy. He just finds it really disgusting. He has this like visceral, I don't wanna touch it kind of feeling. And for him, these are usually in response to like, pictures of honeycombs, or like pictures of corals. I bought a pair of flats that had holepunched-sized circles on them, and he really does not like looking at them because it's physically uncomfortable. He also added sometimes when he cuts open a potato and it has holes in it, he hates that feeling. Like the list of things kept going and that's where we ended. For other people it might be things like cheese with holes fruits with small seeds, like strawberries, like the skin. He said he wasn't bothered by that, but something like lotus, where it's just very holey.
SAM JONES: Even that, that's actually where I start to have like this weird feeling and aversion to it. Yeah: like Swiss cheese, fine; sandals, fine; but like that kind of thing. Urrgghhh, yeah.
HZ: I'll happily eat a slice of lotus, I really like that. But it's when you get those decorative dried lotus pods that have got like twenty holes in a sort of desiccated pod.
SAM JONES: That's what I'm thinking of, yeah.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: So in my relationship, I am the deeply irrational one, and my husband is usually the deeply grounded, not afraid of things one. He's the one who's guiding me away from snakes. Like he's very reasonable about things. And so this is like the one area where I don't see the anxiety. He's shocked that I'm not disgusted by these things; my brain just doesn't process it that way.
HZ: There could be snakes in any of those holes.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: That's true. Now you've changed it.
HZ: Sorry, sorry. Just ruining lives here.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. That's part of what's fascinating is we don't really know why this happens. There are a few possible explanations, like maybe clusters of holes are associated with danger, like the skin of venomous snakes or tarantula eyes. Maybe it's associated with diseases, different skin diseases. One explanation I saw, but I don't know if I really believe, is maybe your brain needs more oxygen to process these patterns. So it like physiologically is creating the sense of distress.
SAM JONES: That feels like a stretch to me. That feels like grasping at straws. But I appreciate the ingenuity of the idea.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. And at the same time, centuries ago, if you had told me that people are hydrophobic because a tiny, invisible thing crawled into them and infected their DNA, which we didn't even know about at the time, if you had told me that, I would've been like, “I don't believe that either.”
SAM JONES: No, that's true. That's true.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: So maybe one day we'll find out that there is something about your oxygen levels when you're processing these patterns.
HZ: But then why not other patterns?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, that's the question. So it does seem to affect women more than men. It's also not recognised as a disorder currently in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM likely because it's not really debilitating for most people, it's just kind of uncomfortable, so that also means there's no clear like criteria for establishing it. But there is an online trypophobia test that you can take to figure out if you have the aversion. And I told my husband about this, and he was like, “No, I don't wanna do this!” It involves looking at images for like one to eight seconds, some of which have clusters of holes. You're asked to estimate how long you saw each image, and then they compare your estimated times for like the holy images versus the neutral images. And that ratio determines whether or not you likely have trypophobia. But like I said, I told my husband and he didn’t want to take it.
SAM JONES: He’s like, “I KNOW.”
HZ: Yeah. I can see why if someone had a fear of holes, they wouldn't want to look at a load of pictures of holes to see if they had a fear of holes. It does seem like a waste of their time.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yep. I'm curious about how many people are like actively seeking this out. I guess I can relate: if you asked me to prove my fear of snakes by stepping into a room full of snakes, I would be like, "no, I don't want to do that. I can tell you that."
HZ: Yeah, but it seems tenuous to suggest that this fear would be related to the eyes of tarantula because, truly, how many of us have been eye to eye with a tarantula in our entire lives?
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Right. Yeah. I think it's supposed to be maybe just that regular sequences and nature maybe reflect something dangerous, but even that feels confusing. I wonder what the state of our knowledge of trypophobia will be in like 20 years. If people talking about it more will give us more insight into why people might be experiencing it, that might get us to like a better hypothesis for it. Because I think right now, all of the potential explanations feel just kind of off.
HZ: Yeah, I suppose it's whether a company like Apple is motivated to put a load of money into researching why people don't wanna buy modern iPhones because of this specifically. Yeah.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: For sure.
HZ: How are you both feeling now after we've been talking about phobias for a while? Do you feel any different to when we began?
SAM JONES: I mean, I definitely - the stuff that you brought to us, Helen, was really interesting. I had not thought about the coining of phobias. And I hadn't had people to chat with about sort of the, the use of phobias, maybe the overuse, misuse, weaponized use of phobias. And so I found that really interesting to hash out together.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah, I was kind of surprised to learn that our use of phobia in this way seems so traceable to one person; that was kind of surprising to me.
HZ: Benjamin Rush, demonstrating that jokes plus time equal etymology.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Somehow, maybe because it's so pervasive, it feels like at some point we started using ‘phobia’. So it's cool to see like, oh, there was a person who made this really popular in this way.
SAM JONES: Yeah.
HZ: Also the timing, because after Benjamin Rush came up with that, you’ve got a period when people are getting really interested in psychology, over the 19th century, and in the late 19th century, when the term really took off, they loooved taxonomy, and they loved naming things and naming patterns.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: A good point. That is like really the time when people were getting into that.
SAM JONES: This was really fun. I love, yeah, I love talking about these kinds of things. I really love language.
HZ: Yeah. It is a good time. And it's also just, yeah, it is so kind of indistinct, almost; like you go in thinking, oh yeah, this will, there'll be kind of solid sides to this box and you're like, no, this box is made out of clouds.
DEBOKI CHAKRAVARTI: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
HZ: Deboki Chakravarti and Sam Jones are the hosts of the podcast Tiny Matters, about tiny things — from molecules to microbes — that have a big impact. Get it from the podplaces and from the American Chemical Society’s website.
And coming up soon on this show, we’ll be learning about a phobia of using a particular kind of word.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary is…
mascon, noun, astronomy: a concentration of denser material below the surface of the moon or other body, causing a local increase in gravitational pull.
Origin 1960s: from mas(s) con(centration).
It’s a portmanteau of mass concentration! Try using ‘mascon’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch, and the podcast we make together, Answer Me This. Thanks to Amanda McLoughlin of Multitude.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk affectionately and persuasively about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitudeshows.com/ads.
You can listen to or read every episode and get more information about the topics and people therein, see photos of the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, check out listings for events coming up – like our zucchini racing meetup in Vancouver mid-September – and become a member of the Allusioverse to help keep this independent podcast going and get the ad free version, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
