Land of the Giants

Land of the Giants, right? I reckon it struck a chord with a lot of kids, because it’s a classic childhood fear – that of being threatened by something much bigger than you, making you feel helpless…like adults.

And I got to thinking. If this was an evolved response, what did it signify, how did it come about, and what good does it do? If it’s a naturally selected trait, then it must confer an advantage to the individual.

What is a fear actually for? Well as a controlling mechanism it makes us avoid certain things or situations, by giving us a “painful” stimulus, i.e. a feeling we don’t like. In that way it plays a similar part as “pain”, only not so severe, and generally before an injury rather than after it (when pain kicks in).

If the brain wants to reward the body and create a learned response as well, it gives us a burst of endorphins when we do something right. But that “quick buzz” is only rewarded after the successful event, because it gives the person something to work towards.

However how do you use a reward system to prevent a person doing something, rather than reward them for doing something? It doesn’t work logically. You have to use an aversion system. That’s what fear is.

So fear of giants is a learned aversion response. What good does it convey to the individual?

Ok, let’s look at what kind of individual it might help. Well one still capable of offspring, and depending on how far back you want to go, that could be a very early age range. With a life-expectancy of 30, you could be looking at early teens or more likely mid childhood.

When I say “learned response”, by the way I don’t mean that it’s learned from other people, or learned while growing up. Rather the mechanism in the brain that provides the feeling of fear. This is what ultimately “programmes” the individual with a fear of this, a dislike of that. That's what learns, the rest of the brain. The brain makes a decision about a couple of directions to go (for example, down the stairs into the dark, or back up into the light), and although it knows why it doesn’t want to go a particular way (it’s dark, it could be dangerous, you could get hurt), it can’t tell other parts of the body these concepts. If it wants the heart to start pounding, it can’t explain the reasons to the heart, it has to do something simple. It produces the feeling of fear which is really a huge cocktail of physiological changes – stimulating glands (adrenal), increasing heart rate, saliva reduction.

So what good does an effect like this do? Well people will point to adrenaline increase, heart rate increase, as the best way of getting the body ready for sustained flight or fight. But there’s more. Why the feeling of dread? That doesn't serve any purpose in getting parts of the body ready for action. The only thing it does is make us feel acutely uncomfortable. That’s what fear is about isn’t it? Dread of what might happen. The “what might happen” is from our conscious mind, because the mind can understand complex concepts, and can be constantly thinking ahead to the “monsters” being just ahead in the dark, or the fact that we’re about to do something we don’t want to.

But there’s a sort of “overlay” of very uncomfortable trepidation. Why that? Is that just a side-effect of the change in hormone levels? Or is it caused by some as yet unknown chemical effect, e.g. from serotonin levels?

OK, can’t answer the above, and for the purpose of the original question it’s irrelevant anyway. It doesn’t answer the question of what the organism gains from it. “Survival” is too broad a term, although survival of the genes is definitely the major factor. But survival how? Since it’s a fear probably generated around adults, it must be caused by something in the relationship between adult and child.

Oh how silly of me. Of course it’s ultimately an “avoidance of strange adults or they might kill you” aversion effect isn’t it? More correctly it probably means “avoid strange things larger than you that you do not recognise as friendly”

Things larger than you are obviously predators that could eat you, so the response has been around for a very very long time. However I think the human race has a more specialised version of the fear response, grafted on like a plugin, a species-specific version telling us to avoid members of our own species if they are larger than us. For most cases this is accompanied by the same physical effects associated with "fear", and the same overall "feeling" from the old "avoid the big monsters" original response.

If that’s the case, it can’t have evolved to assist adults (although of course it has assisted to them reaching adulthood), where most people will rarely meet someone much bigger than then. However there is a state of human development where almost everyone we meet is a lot bigger than us. When we are children, it causes us to avoid “adult” individuals who we do not recognise.

Why avoid them? Because they might cause us pain. Simple as that. A child can’t already have a learned response to concepts like murder, abduction, and rape, since it needs to have this aversion long before it truly understands those concepts. So the simple avoidance of pain is the only thing to use at that age.

The only scenario where a simple response like this could evolve in such a generalised one-size-fits-all form, is in an early primate, where any non-recognised adult you met probably would kill you.

Actually I’ve just realised from those last two paragraphs, that while pain is a very direct response, causing us a feeling that we just can’t bear…fear is the anticipation of pain. So that means this response only works on a species that can think, or at least understand the concept of “the future”. Because that’s what it’s about really isn’t it? Fear is the anticipation of something in the future that may cause us pain. It’s quite a complex thing isn’t it? So it’s still way back in our primate past, but not that far back. If chimpanzees have it as well, then it goes back at least to our common ancestor.