BOO! The Science of Scary with Mathias Clasen & Heather Berlin

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Got with me my co-host, Chuck Nice, Chuckie Baby.

Always good to see you.

Always good to have you.

So today, Chuck, this is an overdue topic for StarTalk.

I don’t know why we didn’t do this years ago.

We’re gonna talk about horror, in particular, horror movies, horror stories, and why people like it.

That’s just weird.

It is weird.

It’s like, why?

Why do you like being scared out of your gourd?

Why?

Why?

What is this?

And believe it or not, there is a person who studies this professionally.

Okay?

As you know, we reach into the academic halls to find people with just the kind of expertise necessary for that topic.

And today, we have Mathias Clasen.

I think I pronounced his name right.

And he’s director of the, get this, Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University.

Now let me just tell you, you ain’t gonna find no brother anywhere who wants to engage in recreational fear.

Our lives are filled with too much real fear.

For us to be like, you know what I think I’m gonna do is relax with a little bit of fear.

Excuse me, could you do me a favor?

Could you put some red and blue lights on while I’m driving?

I just wanna experience a bit of recreational fear.

Right, and wait, and there’s that spooky house on the hill.

Let’s go hide in it.

Yeah, that’s right.

So the Aarhus University is in Denmark.

So he’s Danish here and he’s associate editor of checking his pedigree here.

Associate editor of evolutionary studies and imaginative culture.

I mean, this is like, my gosh, the people have expertise in this stuff.

And he’s author of Why Horror Seduces.

And something that’s coming out around now is a very nervous person’s guide to horror movies.

And so, and he’s got a TED Talk, Lessons from a Terrified Horror Researcher.

So this is, all right, we got it here.

Mathias has all the bases covered, man.

But Mathias, tell me, first, welcome to StarTalk, welcome.

Thank you.

Okay, excellent.

I don’t know what recreational fear is, I’m sorry.

You’re gonna have to explain that one.

Right, yeah, I think it’s a concept that we invented for the occasion.

Okay.

But we define it as those kinds of activities in which people derive pleasure from fear.

So the prototypical-

Crazy people do that, yeah, okay.

Well, actually, well, we can get back to that, but-

You know, the prototypical example of recreational fear is probably horror, horror movies, Stephen King novels, horror video games, haunted attractions, but also activities like extreme sports or pretending you were a monster and chasing your kids through the apartment.

That’s a kind of recreational fear activity in which the child gets to experience what it feels like to be a little bit afraid while realizing there is no real danger.

So it’s fear while maintaining the cocoon of safety.

You know that you’re safe, but yet somehow you’re tricking your brain into feeling like you’re scared.

So, and you would distinguish that from like, like Chuck is saying, actual fear, where there is no safety net there or you don’t know that there’s a safety net.

So the fear triggers different things within you.

So did you come to this as someone who’s just a big fan of horror novels?

What’s your background on this?

Yeah, well, I used to not be a big fan.

I used to get nightmares from the most, you know, innocent ghost story, but then something changed in my teenage years and that’s a very usual trajectory.

A kind of hedonic reversal where what used to be aversive to me became attractive.

And aren’t teens a big part of the marketplace for horror movies?

Yeah, they are.

We did some studies on that relationship between age and horror liking.

But so, yeah, my professional interest really grows out of personal fascination.

And so that is the normal trajectory.

Yours is the reverse?

Well, the normal trajectory is that kids are fascinated with scary stuff, but mildly scary stuff.

And then that fascination kind of increases during development and it peaks in the late teenage years.

Yeah, so I’m fairly typical in that respect.

Well, that may explain why I live my entire life terrified because I’m older.

You’re talking to a teenager’s mind.

I can’t grow up.

But why is it that, okay, if that’s an arc and if it’s normal and it’s a common human trait, why isn’t it in everyone?

What do we have our numbers here?

Is it only about half of people like horror?

I would be in the other half.

It’s not that I’m afraid of it or don’t.

I’m just not interested.

Once again, the scientists.

Once again, the analytical mind overrides everything.

Yeah, it kind of did.

And so tell me what’s going on.

What is the recipe in the half of people that do enjoy this versus those that don’t?

Am I missing something or do I have something that the other half doesn’t have?

Yeah, I wish I knew.

I mean, we’ve been trying to get a grip on the personality profile of horror fans.

I teamed up with a good colleague, Jens Kilgore Christensen.

He’s a media scholar.

And so we tried to get a fix on what big five personality traits are correlated with horror liking.

And thrill seeking seems to be a personality trait that is related to enjoying horror movies, but also a trait called openness to experience.

So people who enjoy new adventures, intellectual stimulation.

But you would fit that, Bill.

So I’m not sure what exactly…

Well, in my mind, but not my body.

Once you put your body in this vice, that’s a new experience.

No, I can think that one through.

So there’s a difference between what your body’s going through and what your mind goes through, I guess.

See, and it’s funny, though.

I am not a fan of horror films simply because I don’t…

The scary part is really too scary for me.

And I’m…

And you’re black.

If I’m the only one who heard that, like, I’m good.

So, I mean, I have to be honest, though.

I am fully aware on an intellectual level that, you know, that I’m in no danger and that I have suspended disbelief so that I can be a part of this experience.

Mm-hmm.

But yet, what happens to me afterwards, I can’t take.

I can’t take it.

It keeps replaying in my head, and it starts to affect me.

That’s just what happens to me, you know?

But yet, I’m a thrill seeker.

So, Mathias, tell us about what’s going on inside someone physiologically while they’re experiencing it versus what effect it might have on them later.

Not only just intellectually, but how about biophysiologically?

What do you know about changes in the body and in the mind?

So we know that when people experience recreational fear, or horror specifically, they get the physiological arousal that is associated with fear.

So they experience fear.

But they find pleasure in that experience.

So it’s not just, I mean, they experience fear and joy at the same time.

And there is a peculiar relationship between fear and enjoyment in these kinds of recreational activities.

And that is something we have actually measured in a study we did in a haunted attraction.

Where we looked at the relationship between fear and enjoyment and we found that there was a sweet spot.

It used to be the case that people thought that the more fear, the more enjoyment.

I mean, you’ve seen movie trailers for horror films that say, you know, you won’t sleep for two weeks, but this will scare the crap out of you.

Kind of suggesting that the scarier, the better.

But it turns out, actually, if we look at the heart rate and people’s self-reported experience, there is a sweet spot, just so, just right amount of fear that is conducive to the most pleasure.

So lots of physiological arousal.

The heart is hammering, the palms get sweaty, the mind is kind of narrowed on the stimulus, the movie, or the actors who are trying to scare you.

And then afterwards, it takes a while for people to calm down, and most people actually claim that they have some lingering effects, that they feel more vigilant, that they watch a horror movie, they go into the basement to collect the laundry, and they think that tiny little sound in the corner of the basement is evidence of a chainsaw killer.

Going into the basement for any reason.

Yes.

Yeah.

Nothing good ever happened at a basement, all right?

Yeah.

People get buried there.

Yeah.

So what about your immune system?

What were we reading about this?

There is some evidence to suggest that there is a short-term boost to the immune system from watching a horror movie.

But it’s very preliminary.

The doctor is not going to recommend horror movies as a system boost anytime soon.

So what you’re saying is it could give you a heart attack and kill you, but if it doesn’t, you have a better immune system.

It’s super rare that people die from fright watching horror movies.

Super rare.

Take two Freddy Kruegers and call me in the morning.

So is this some of what you talked about in your TED Talk, just the sort of the physiological responses here, right?

So how about your people’s mental health?

Right.

Does it improve it?

Is it different?

That’s one of the most exciting lines of research that we’re pursuing, because people used to think that it was probably bad for your mental health.

I mean, there’s a lot of bias and prejudice associated with horror, that it’s psychologically harmful, that it’s morally corrosive.

It could turn you into the person committing the horror.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, copycats or whatever.

I’ve got to tell you, that’s the reason why I worship the devil.

Same here, right?

What?

So Chuck, this is your last show.

So it does look actually like there can be positive health effects.

We did a study during the pandemic where we looked at psychological resilience and horror movie consumption.

And it looks like people who watch a lot of horror movies actually had better mental health during the pandemic, possibly, because they have a lot of practice in fear regulation.

So they watch horror movies, they get scared, and they use a bunch of strategies to regulate their own fear.

And then they use those strategies also in, you know, real life.

So you watch a lot of zombie movies, all of a sudden this pandemic comes and you’re like…

And it’s a walk in the park.

I’ve already been through like eight zombie apocalypses.

This is nothing.

Because a pandemic such as that approximates some of the early stages of a zombie apocalypse.

That’s right.

Because in a zombie apocalypse, certain industries get taken out because all those workers are dead or zombified.

So they’re not making the toilet paper, right?

They’re not producing the energy.

They’re not producing…

And you see these shortages in society.

So, wow, so the horror movie folks were just chilling.

Yeah, exactly.

They were.

And that’s why the CDC had a zombie apocalypse campaign ten years ago.

They said that if you’re ready for the zombie apocalypse, you’re ready for any kind of disaster.

How did I miss that?

The government telling you to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.

That’s amazing.

Wait, so how about…

Wait, I’m just reminded, there was this hilarious sketch by Key and Peele.

There’s this neighborhood, right?

It’s an integrated neighborhood, and so there’s some black folks over on the side with the barbecue and other white folks, and zombies are coming down the street, and they turn towards the black home, and then they turn away and keep walking, and they only eat the white people.

And they said, these are racist zombies.

That’s a funny sketch, Adam.

It was a pretty crazy sketch.

We don’t like dark meat.

That’s funny.

Look for it.

It’s somewhere online.

You got to find it.

Racist zombies.

But Mathias, tell me, if I have a prior condition, could it be worsened?

So sorry, not necessarily a prior physiological condition, but a prior mental condition?

If I come from war and I have some PTSD, could this trigger something within me?

That’s an important word these days.

What triggers you?

Yeah.

I think it could go either way.

So there is some evidence to suggest that people with preexisting mental health conditions can be hurt by horror movies.

But there is also now emerging some evidence to suggest that people with anxiety disorders actually get relief from watching horror movies so that they self-medicate with scary movies for a bunch of reasons.

I think partly because if you have an anxiety disorder, you find yourself in this fog of free-floating anxiety day in and day out with no clear source and no control.

And no benchmarking of it.

Yeah, no calibration for it.

Yeah, interesting.

Exactly.

And that kind of calibration and the sense of control and a clear identifiable source comes with seeking out a horror movie.

And maybe also the kind of practicing of coping skills, the emotion regulation expertise that you can develop through engagement with recreational fear.

Well, we got to take a quick break, but when we come back more on sort of the physiology and psychology of fear with Mathias Clasen on StarTalk.

Hey, I’m Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Bringing the universe down to earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk.

Part two of our investigation into horror, what it feels like, what you’re thinking, how you react to horror movies and horror stories.

And we’ve got one of the world’s experts on this, Mathias Clasen, and he’s the director of the recreational fear lab.

Yes, such a thing exists at the Aarhus University, and this is in Denmark, of course.

So, let’s continue with this, Mathias.

Tell me about, do you have to keep feeding the horror to the person, or is just one or few of these experiences good enough for them to just reflect on it?

So in other words, is it like a drug?

Do you have to get more and more and more of it as you continue?

In order to derive pleasure from it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Does your thresholding keep rising and you have to then get more and more of it?

I think probably, yes.

I think there is a kind of habituation, just as if you’re an aficionado of hot peppers.

You’ll probably graduate to ever increasing.

You build tolerance.

And I think you build tolerance in different ways.

And also over time, people develop media literacy.

They become better at using strategies for reducing fear in response to a horror movie.

For example, by reminding themselves that it’s just a movie or by seeing through the effects that create the scares.

Interesting.

It’s funny because, you know, the same thing happens kind of with comedians.

They don’t laugh.

And then what they do laugh at becomes more and more dark.

They become more and more, they become exceedingly dark.

And the darker it is, the more it elicits a laugh, which is how many of them just end up getting canceled.

Yeah, that’s where they drive off the cliff when that happens, right?

They don’t see the warning signs of it.

So you still haven’t told me, Mathias, why some people love it and some people hate it or some people are indifferent.

I’m more in the indifferent camp.

Why, if it’s that physiologically potent, why isn’t it a 100% reaction?

Right, I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t get back to that because I don’t know.

Because what we will be doing in our third segment is bringing on our favorite neuroscientist to tell us what research and neuroscience says about this.

Because you come to this from the literary side of academia, correct?

But you’re still doing experiments on people, so that’s cool.

It’s sort of like experimental psychology.

Yes, I teamed up with people who have expertise in cognitive psychology and experimental studies, so it’s a big part of what we do.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And so, is Chuck right that if you spend a lot of your life in danger, in actual danger, that you’re not going to want to go into situations where there’s pretend danger, because it doesn’t really do anything for you?

Another example, because you correlated horror movie watching with, what did you say, extreme sports or extreme experiences, you know, jumping out of airplanes and things.

And to Chuck’s point, I don’t know how many black people have ever died purposefully jumping out of an airplane, because they just don’t do that.

Just think, no, I’m just going to try to survive this walk down the street, all right, rather than jumping out of planes.

So is there any truth to the dangers you experience in everyday life and whether you want to seek them out in these forms of entertainment?

Right.

That’s one of the many, many things we don’t know.

I’m not so sure, because horror movies did better than ever before in 2020 and 2021.

I mean, the market share of horror movies just blew up.

So people are finding themselves in a pretty scary world, and yet they seek to scary entertainment, perhaps as a context in which they can confront anxiety and have a little bit of fun with it, derive a little bit of pleasure from it.

Yeah, but if you can get accustomed to, what’s the term you use?

The novelty of the horror can wear off, and they have to sort of do it a little differently next time.

I’m reminded when Steven Spielberg spoke of Jaws, he had a regret in that movie.

The regret was he showed twice a bobbing, decapitated head in the water.

And he said, I should have never done that a second time.

Because he watched people’s reaction the first time, he was like…

And the second time, oh, another bobbing head.

And it completely lost the impact.

And so that was one of his earliest movies, and he learned from that.

And so I’m just curious if showing the same thing twice loses its novelty, haven’t we run out of horror movie plots by now?

Or ways to scare people?

Aren’t we done?

No, I mean, we’ve been going over the same basic plot structure for probably thousands of years.

Good guys, medieval monsters and may or may not survive.

So it’s kind of like the blues.

You have a few chords and you can get a lot of creativity out of different combinations of those chords.

So I think that the building blocks of horror are few and basic and they are circumscribed by human biology.

The kinds of things we fear are reflected in horror.

I get what you’re saying, but why is it that the things that we fear are never, like the real things we fear are very rarely represented in horror films?

Like for me, the horror film would be The Mortgage is Late Again.

That would be like the horror film that I would have to go watch.

That’s like a real fear.

You know, they always tend to be supernatural.

Especially Stephen King stories.

If they’re not supernatural, then the supernatural element is just not acknowledged, but it’s there.

And then if it deviates, not deviates, but if it’s not that, then it’s kind of like Slasher.

Even like Freddy Krueger, which is supernatural, right?

He’s still just really, it’s a Slasher film.

I think the stuff that does occur over and over again in horror, the haunting, the demons, the ghosts, the zombies, all the creepy supernatural stuff, and those crazy killers in hockey masks and wearing chainsaws.

I mean, that stuff is dramatic.

That stuff is potent and it sparks the imagination.

If you wanted to sell a movie, a shocking thriller about the overdue mortgage, nobody is going to buy it.

It doesn’t really work.

It would be true, but it wouldn’t be an economic success.

Exactly.

Chuck Nice stars in The Overdue Mortgage.

Exactly.

So, Mathias, tell me about the startle reflex.

Some people have it for better or for worse and others don’t.

Is it because they’re expecting to be scared and then it happens in a way they don’t expect it?

What’s going on inside the mind for that?

Yeah.

So the jump scare is one of the most common, well-known and universally detested tropes of horror movies.

We all know the jump scare.

The character is going around a dark basement, somewhere they shouldn’t be, and then suddenly, boom, something nasty jumps out.

And you hear a loud, sudden noise, and everybody in the movie theater jumps.

So the jump scare, and there are about 10 jump scares per horror movie, is designed to really engage the startled response, which is a very basic biological reflex, basically.

We share it with a bunch of other animals.

I mean, you can do a jump scare on a cat if you have a cat.

Or a fainting goat.

Exactly, yes.

And they respond in a fairly similar way.

So the jump scare is a really effective technique, and lots of people frown on it because it seems cheap.

You know, it’s easy to create a jump scare.

Now, let me ask you this.

You can do it not only visually, but also with sound.

And then there’s a loud sound, even if nothing jumps in the way.

That can startle you, too, right?

So let me ask you this.

So I’ve got a 15-year-old son, and he loves horror films, and so do all of his kids.

I mean, his friends, right?

Here’s the thing.

They’ve all adopted this disposition where the less scared you are, the more analytical you are, then the better you are at watching horror films.

So if there’s a jump scare, he’s like, oh, that’s BS, oh, that’s, you know, I can’t believe you fell for the jump scare.

So is that some kind of just like, I don’t know, are you a poser if you’re scared of jump scares?

Because they scared the hell out of me.

Right.

They scared the hell out of me as well.

But it sounds like your kid and his friends are using a very effective coping strategy.

I mean, you know, approaching horror movies as construction.

They’re trying to get behind the scenes and see the jump scare for what it is, a cinematic technique.

And that’s one of the reasons why I think people should watch horror movies with their kids to teach them how to approach it analytically, because that’s an important skill.

Except that he’s the one teaching me.

Yes, the roles are flipped around.

Do you have any insights into how or why a key and peel after that race as a zombie skit that they performed?

Chuck hadn’t seen it until the break.

The man’s looking at it during the break.

Oh, my God.

It’s hilarious.

And what happens?

So Jordan Peele afterwards does a horror movie called Get Out.

Right?

And so is this something every director wants to do?

Do you think you got to have at least one of these in your portfolio?

Are there any thoughts about that?

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question because horror movies for the longest time have been associated with low brow, mindless, low budget, aesthetically uninteresting fluff basically.

I mean, I work in an English department and I’m a horror researcher and it doesn’t have the same cultural prestige as being an expert in Renaissance poetry or the sonnets of Shakespeare.

So lots of…

You think?

I think, I do think that.

I can imagine just going down the faculty resumes, right?

It’s like an expert on Renaissance art and on Shakespeare, on Milton.

Horror movies.

But we love you.

That’s why we have you on the show.

We don’t have any of your colleagues here.

Screw those pompous asses.

For sure.

But I think some of that prejudice toward horror is actually going away.

And I think one large reason is the success of Get Out, because Peel very consciously used storytelling devices from the horror genre and from science fiction to tell a story that was very progressive.

He wanted to change things in the world, and he did that by using the tools of horror.

Yeah, and it was socially relevant, the way it was social, everything about it.

So let me ask you this, speaking of what you guys just brought up, which is Jordan Peel and horror, is there any combination where comedy actually enhances the effects of horror or vice versa, where being scared makes you, you know, enjoy the laughter anymore?

I don’t know of any real, like, comedy horror films, but even in…

No, a scary movie is a comedy horror film.

Yeah, but it didn’t scare me.

Oh, okay.

It made fun of the genre.

It made fun of it.

It was a parody, whereas Get Out scared me, and there were some really funny moments in that movie.

That’s true.

That’s true.

Good point.

Yeah, I think, for one thing, the kind of the contrast between laughter and screams can be used very effectively in a movie like Get Out or, you know, Kevin in the Woods, or I’m reading Joe Hill right now, one of my favorite writers, and he is hilarious, but he can also write some really scary stuff.

But also, I think often the line between humor and horror is kind of, it’s a thin and porous line.

Something can be so horrible on the screen that it kind of becomes grotesque and funny, like in the Evil Dead movies.

It’s just over the top and, you know, it’s so far out that you stop screaming and you start laughing.

So it’s a kind of thin line.

Could it be like there’s a scene in Jurassic Park where T-Rex bites into the outhouse and grabs the lawyer who’s on the toilet and swallows him in one gulp?

That’s kind of funny.

Made me laugh just hearing you bring it up again.

I pictured it in my head and I started giggling.

Nobody wants to be on a toilet and then eaten by T-Rex.

This was a kind of a reprehensible character in the story.

He was a lawyer.

I love it.

Well, Mathias, we’re going to have to say goodbye to you.

For a third segment, we’re going to bring in a neuroscientist to sort of see what they have to say about this very same genre.

But I don’t know what they’ll know that you don’t know because you’ve been doing all these experiments and that’s ultimately how we get the answers in science.

But it’s been a delight to talk to you.

It’s been a delight to even know that you exist as a person with this expertise.

Because as an academic, I just love it that somebody has devoted their lives to something that everyone else either just takes for granted or doesn’t think there’s anything there because there usually is when you part the curtains.

You know what we never got to?

Your favorite horror film of all time.

Oh, let’s ask that, sure.

Just before we go, what is that?

Let’s say, always horrid, Halloween by John Carpenter.

Oh, very classic.

Classic.

Yeah, I haven’t seen nearly as many horror films as you.

I’ve probably seen 1% of them that you have.

But I have to put up there the Omen.

Oh, yeah.

Also a classic.

Just because the idea of what was going on.

To me, it wasn’t how bloody things were or anything.

It was just, oh my gosh.

If this is actually happening, this is terrifying.

And it was, because it’s like a huge conspiracy playing out the entire movie.

And there’s nothing you can do to stop that conspiracy from unfolding.

Correct.

Correct.

Correct.

So that was spooky.

It’s a good one.

How about you, Chuck?

Oh, man.

I’m going to say Finding Nemo.

That shark scared the wits out of you.

Bruce got me, man.

All right.

No, we got to hold the quits there.

So Mathias, do you have a website we can direct people to or social media?

Well, my lab has a website.

It’s fear.au.dk.

And I’m also on Twitter and try to share some of our exciting findings.

And what’s your handle on Twitter?

It’s my name.

So the funny looking A and then Mathias Clasen.

At Mathias Clasen.

Yeah.

All right, dude.

Well, thanks for being on StarTalk.

When we come back, we’re going to bring in Heather Berlin.

She’s our neuroscientist at large.

And she’s going to tell us all about what’s happening in the neurochemistry of fear and startling and anything else that might keep you awake at night.

We’re back, StarTalk.

We’re talking about the science of fear, of recreational fear, coming off of two segments with one of the world’s experts in that subject from the recreational fear lab, Mathias Clasen, in, is it Denmark, Chuck, where that was?

I think so, yes, it is Denmark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we thought we’d bring in our favorite neuroscientist to see what she has to say about Heather Berlin.

Heather, welcome back to StarTalk.

Always good to have you in arm’s reach of us because we get to these moments where, I don’t know what’s going on.

You know what’s going on, Chuck.

Never.

So, neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, associate clinical professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the ICON School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, not the ICANT School.

Heather, what’s your favorite scary movie?

I like psychological thrillers, so I’m into like Silence of the Lambs and that kind of genre, you know?

I don’t know if I have a favorite.

I mean, Poltergeist really left a mark on me as a kid that really, you know, there’s some that are just imprinted in my brain and that’s one of them.

So, tell me about people who seek this stuff out, because what came up in a previous segment was Chuck and I were commiserating.

We’re saying, you know, if your life is already a risk, just walking down the street, because you grew up in a tough neighborhood or the cops might be beating up on you, you’re not saying, gee, I want more scary horror in my life.

So, we were hypothesizing that if you live a life of danger and risk, that you don’t then need to seek it out.

So, can you distinguish between those two?

I do think that there is some truth to that.

Some of the joy or the pleasure that people get out of sensation seeking or seeing horror films and getting themselves scared.

Does that include jumping out of airplanes?

I mean, that kind of thing as well?

Yeah, yeah, it does, it does.

It’s the same, it’s the same physiologic reaction where you’re getting that sort of fight or flight response.

You’re getting the cortisol, the adrenaline.

And depending on the context you’re in, you could interpret it as being a really pleasurable sensation or a really terrifying sensation.

But the actual physiologic response is the same.

It’s just how you perceive it, how you interpret it, which is context dependence changes.

So some people who maybe are slightly understimulated as a baseline chronically are seeking out those higher levels of stimulation to feel satisfied, to feel good.

And there’s also something about scaring yourself in a scenario where you know there’s no real threat, because then you get that sort of high and then there’s also that release when you’re, what’s called the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and calms everything down.

That’s also very pleasurable.

So there’s this exciting ride.

That’s pleasurable because you were in a tense state and then you come out of the tense state and that transition is where you derive the pleasure, I guess, is that right?

Exactly, exactly.

The release of tension as well is really pleasurable.

And you know, that’s kind of weird.

It’s kind of like hitting my thumb with a hammer and then sticking it in some ice.

You know, it’s like, damn, that hurt.

Oh, that feels so good.

Well, you know, I mean-

This is how Chuck brings pleasure to his life only after he imparts pain.

Yes, okay.

Right.

Well, there are some people who have, who are dealing with different psychological issues that are in a lot of psychological pain and they self-harm, you know, the people who cut themselves, harm themselves because in a way it is a release of tension, of psychological tension that they have.

It’s why I do comedy.

You want to harm yourself every time, Chuck.

But there’s something about it also brings you into the moment.

There’s an immediacy.

So if you think of a free climber, a rock climber, you know, they can’t think about all their problems or anticipate things about the future.

You’re right there in the moment.

There’s an intensity to it.

That’s also, there’s something pleasurable about it.

But people who in their everyday life are living under constant stress or who have to be sort of hypervigilant, they tend to not be as attracted to scaring themselves for entertainment purposes.

So, you know, and people who have come out of, let’s say war situations or have sort of PTSD and are hypervigilant.

So any little thing can trigger them.

They’re not looking for more stimulation.

They’re already sort of chronically overstimulated and don’t need any more.

It’s people who kind of maybe need a bit more to get that same high.

So I would intuit that if you grew up in a sort of environment that was threatening, you’re not gonna be attracted to these horror films as well.

But is there any therapeutic value to purposefully scaring someone?

If, for example, they had PTSD or some other kind of, some other kind of trauma in their life, does more trauma but controlled help get them out of it, or do you just avoid it altogether?

Yeah, and that’s part of what exposure therapy is about.

So the idea-

That’s the term I was looking for there, yeah.

Yeah, exposure therapy.

So you basically, you create a hierarchy with somebody.

So like, what is like your worst fear?

You’d rate it like a 10 all the way down to a one.

And what you do is you start out with something that where they’re at like a five or a six in terms of their fear and anxiety, you expose them to a situation, but it’s still a safe environment until they eventually habituate.

So the brain over time can’t be chronically in this state of fear, eventually it subsides.

And then when the person gets down to say a one or two in terms of their fear level, then you take them up to the next notch.

And so you keep sort of, it’s called gradual exposure, gradually exposing a person to their worst fears until their brain learns, okay, you don’t have to be afraid of this anymore.

These are when people are having irrational fears, right?

If it was something, a real fear, you know, you’re not gonna expose them to say, you know.

Okay, of course, of course.

So it’s like good tolerance instead of bad tolerance.

Like alcohol is bad tolerance.

You gotta keep drinking more and more.

And this, you actually wanna ramp it up so that you can come down.

But for example, if you fear pigeons, that’s not rational, right?

Right, or even spiders.

You know, people with spider phobia.

I don’t know, man.

Is the pigeon sitting on top of this?

No, you fear pigeon poop.

That’s different.

That’s a different fear.

That’s true.

Wait, wait.

So you were saying, Heather?

So let’s say you fear a spider, for example.

You know, it’s also interesting is that there are some evolutionary predispositions we have to certain types of fears.

So people aren’t born necessarily with a fear of electric sockets, right?

Because that wasn’t, you know, that didn’t exist deep in our…

The Serengeti didn’t have electric sockets.

So even though they had one prong sockets, the two prong and three prong came later.

So we don’t have, so that’s not a common fear.

What are common fears?

Claustrophobia, heights, you know, fear of insects or spiders.

Because I think there is a genetic component to certain types of fears that we are predisposed to.

Then there’s also learned fears over time.

If you see somebody in your environment growing up that’s always afraid of say a spider, you might learn that fear as well.

But with the exposure is that you first, you see what they can tolerate.

Maybe it’s just the picture of a cartoon of a spider and then you get them to habituate that.

And then you show them a real spider.

And then over time with this process, you can get someone who is terrified of spiders to hold a tarantula in their hand and be okay with it.

So I wonder if Chuck, this applies to comedy.

Like you start people out slow and then you can get them to laugh at you.

No, it doesn’t work that way.

You start out slow and then it’s all downhill from there.

So Heather, what about people who don’t have a fear factor but still love horror movies?

Like, what are they getting out of it?

People who love, well, this is the thing with horror films is that it activates this sort of fear center of your brain, the amygdala and there’s a way, in a sense, it’s like you’re almost reversing for if there was a real threat but you’re doing it in a safe environment.

So you’re kind of, okay, well, what would happen if I was walking down the street alone and I heard a strange noise or a man came at me?

And then you’re in a way, you’re putting yourself in the scenario, playing it out and then you’ll have a toolkit for if anything like that ever happened to you in real life.

So there is some sort of rehearsal aspect to it as well.

Yeah, the problem with that rehearsal is in all these movies, the people do the dumbest thing ever.

You know, it’s just like, yeah, well, let’s run to the shed.

Yeah, no, no, you know, that’s where all the tools are.

Okay, so Chuck, that’s a different question for Heather.

Heather, why are the teens in horror movies so stupid?

Oh, yeah.

Their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed.

Oh, that’s great, you got an answer to that.

Oh, look at that, you got an answer.

Oh my gosh.

There’s no rational thought.

It’s just pure adrenaline and no rational foot.

That’s funny, it would not be believable if you had a 40 year old person saying, let’s run to the haunted house to be safe from the scary things.

That doesn’t play accurately, very good.

Because we have a more evolved prefrontal cortex, we can kind of override the fear response, think things through a little bit more and make more logical decisions.

And also sex isn’t worth dying for because we’ve had it.

Like, you know.

You know what I mean?

So it’s just like, meet me by the lake and we’ll go skinny dipping.

And it’s like, nah, nah, how about this?

You meet me at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, okay?

And we will do it.

How about that?

I don’t have to go to the lake at midnight to have sex.

So Heather, what about the startle response?

I mean, you could be like intellectually afraid, but to be startled, for example, I bet when you were watching Silence of the Lambs, there’s nothing really startling in that, right?

So what’s the difference between not being startled, but still being afraid?

Oh yeah.

So, okay, well, the startle response is almost, is an unconscious response, right?

You know, the brain, there’s different pathways in the brain.

There’s one that just goes straight to the amygdala that sets off this sympathetic nervous system, which puts into place this fight or flight response.

And that can happen automatically.

That’s kind of a startle response.

So, stimulus comes in, a loud noise, you jump.

Then there’s the kind of slower, more cognitive fear response, which is that psychological thriller that is more about the anticipation, which is building up a suspense and the fear of what might happen.

And films are really good at doing that, you know, like…

That’s how I felt with Get Out, by the way.

That wasn’t specifically a horror movie, but it had me terrified, just because I had been in situations that greatly resembled many of the scenes portrayed in that film.

And, you know, people come up to me, I like your body, I like this, I like that.

It’s like, okay, why?

What do you, you know, what?

And they took this to, like, a scary extreme, where people then start bidding on your body after a brain transplant.

And so they don’t want your brain, they want your body.

It was like, whoa.

And it has more to do with anxiety.

So the difference between anxiety and fear is, you know, anxiety is anticipation of a future threat, something bad might happen.

And so you’re getting these cues and these signals, like you need to be prepared, something bad might potentially happen, though it hasn’t happened yet.

And that’s anxiety.

Fear is that immediate, it’s happening right now, run for your life.

And so there’s this subtle difference between the two.

And humans are one of the only animals that actually can have anxiety, which is fear of a future, potentially bad something happening, because we can think far into the future.

Animals are more just having an immediate fear response and less so that anticipation of future negative events.

You know, animal ever said, next week, this could be bad for me.

It’s not a thing.

Wait, wait.

So Heather, if there’s, can you explain to me the difference between fear factors on things that we obviously didn’t evolve to be afraid of?

So some people might be afraid of a chainsaw.

Some people might be afraid of some other weaponry.

Or, and people tend to be more afraid of that than just a gun, right?

Since when are guns ever used in horror movies?

Like never.

That’s too boring, right?

But it’s probably a more potent means of you losing your life.

So, why are we afraid in ways that are not direct?

The most unlikely way of dying doesn’t scare you, but the thing that could be outlandish terrifies you.

Yes.

So, guns should be scary, but they’re not used in horror movies.

The hatchet, the chainsaw, the, you know, something else, yet…

Oh, well, maybe it’s because we’re in America, and everybody knows that there’s a really good chance you’re gonna get shot.

Everybody’s got a gun, so ain’t nothing scary about it.

Right, there’s nothing scary.

We’ve all made peace with the fact that there’s a good chance we’ll get shot.

So, now a hatchet is like, oh, my God, that’s terrifying, like nobody gets hatcheted.

Right, so is it because they’re getting more and more inventive with ways they can kill you in a horror movie?

So, what I think, first of all, with guns, part of it is we’ve habituated to guns.

They’re not as scary because we see them so often.

And it also tends to be a very quick death, right?

You get shot, you die.

These other forms of death that they tend to use in horror films kind of drag it out.

They’re more gruesome in a way, you know?

But outside of that even, you know, there are psychological aspects to this, particularly classical conditioning.

So the original studies of classical conditioning with somebody, it was little Albert, it was called.

They basically, it was a little boy, and they played this really loud startling noise for him.

And then they paired that startling noise, which was the thing that he became afraid of.

Was this before that was outlawed?

Yeah, these were experiments like in the 1950s before we had the ethical considerations.

You said it like, yeah, I got Albert next door, you know.

And he became my husband, you know.

Later on, little Albert became Jason.

Exactly.

This poor kid, and so they trained him to fear this loud noise.

Then what they did is they would pair the loud noise with like a little, I think it was like a white rabbit or something, or a little white rat.

And then it became fear of the white rat.

And then that generalized to fear of anything or fear of any white fluffy thing.

And over time, you start to make these sort of associations.

And so that’s sort of part of what they’re playing at in some horror films.

Like maybe it’s not even the knife you’re afraid of, but it’s, you know, walking into the store that sells knives or whatever it is.

It starts to, you can generalize out.

So the fear expands to all these other objects that are surrounding the actual fearful thing.

So the best horror making horror movie producers are those who’ve spoken to you in advance.

And no.

I do consult on films.

Well, filmmakers really do understand the psychology of fear and they really play on your fear.

Part of it has to do with uncertainty.

So there’s a suspense, there’s a buildup.

They’re playing with fear because when you’re uncertain, if something is going to be there, is there going to be a tiger present or not, you’re hypervigilant.

You’re paying exquisite attention to what’s happening in the environment, anticipating something happening.

So they kind of wrap you, rope you in with that with some suspension music.

And then it’s the shock, the fear, and that’s where the adrenaline surges.

So they’re playing with your neural chemicals in ways that they understand how after working with people like me.

And they’re masterful at it.

So it’s almost like when you enter a movie theater, you’re allowing your brains to be played in a way.

And you’re going on a kind of emotional roller coaster ride and you’re allowing yourself to go on that with them.

But the music, the lights, all of it, is to build the suspense and the unexpected and then suddenly burst out and scare you.

What about being scared of things that are not real and were never real?

Like ghosts or…

Vampires.

Yeah, vampires.

Is it because we have such a good imagination that the never real become real for us to fear them?

It feels very inefficient, evolutionarily inefficient to fear things that never existed.

Yeah, like my irrational fear of Santa Claus.

So we have these evolutionarily older systems that are at play and they can be easily triggered by uncertainty.

Ghosts, it’s this uncertainty.

You hear a sound, you hear a noise, and then of course we’ve been fed information from films from the time we’re little kids, right?

So this imagery has gotten in there and we make these associations, even though our rational brain, our prefrontal cortex knows, there’s no such thing as the boogeyman, for example, but there’s this more animalistic part of our brain that’s been fed this information over many years and so it can’t help but sort of have an automatic thought like, oh, what if it’s a ghost?

What if it’s the boogeyman?

And then only after does your prefrontal cortex kick in and is giving you a rationalization of the fear and then it can start to quell it.

Then it starts to downregulate the amygdala, the fear center of the brain.

So what happens is first the amygdala of the fear is triggered, crazy thoughts can pop up based on things that you were exposed to in childhood even.

And then the prefrontal cortex says, oh, no, no, no, it’s okay.

It was just the cat knocking something over and then it calms down the amygdala.

So you need all the pieces in working together in a sequence there.

Interesting.

Because when I was a very geeky kid and I just rationalized away almost all fear that would grip others in tension.

So what are you afraid of?

Are you afraid of anything?

Yeah, I can’t think of anything.

I don’t startle.

If someone jumps in front of me, it’s like I’m ready to fight them.

I can do that because I used to do martial arts.

But I don’t fear it.

I’m not swimming with sharks.

Okay, yes.

So then let me get it.

You fear land sharks.

There you go.

Okay, fine.

Thank you, Heather.

So I would fear things in places where such things exist that I fear, but I know never to go there.

How about that?

So I’ll tell you my biggest fear.

My biggest fear, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, number one is death.

I definitely don’t want to die, so that’s a huge fear.

And another, and this is probably not a fear that you have, but if anybody offered me to go to space, like go stay at the International Space Station, I would say hell no, because the idea of being trapped in a little tube and away from Earth is to me terrifying.

So I think…

Okay, I would do it only if the person who designed the spaceship had already sent their mother and brought them back successfully.

That’s the data that I would use to override that fear, and then I would go.

Okay, so you must have…

You have a very strong…

The prefrontal cortex is strong in you, Neil.

No!

You may go in peace with the force.

Fear is the beginning of the dark side.

Guys, we gotta call it quits there.

This has been a fun show.

I learned a lot.

And this is a great topic.

Maybe we can revisit it in other ways because there’s no end of fear and fear factors on the scientific frontier, especially in your field of study, Heather.

So, thanks for coming in for this.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

Alright, Chuck, always good to have you, dude.

Always a pleasure.

This has been StarTalk.

We’ve been talking about the science of fear.

And as you know, on StarTalk, we talk about the science of everything.

There’s happened to be fear this time.

Alright, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Oh, my God.

I’m sorry, I’m watching the sketch.

While you guys were doing that, I’m watching the sketch.

It’s completely hilarious.

It’s hilarious.

No, yeah, I thought it was like, I didn’t realize that the zombies themselves are racist.

All the zombies are white.

And Key Appeal are walking around.

And the zombies won’t go because they’re-

They’re actually afraid of black people.

And they’re zombies.

And then there’s one scene where the little girl just goes, and the parents go, no, no, no, no, no.

The zombie parents are like, no, no.

Oh my God, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

Okay.

How could you not know about this?

Chuck, you’re the man.

I can’t believe I didn’t know about that sketch.

Oh my God, that’s hilarious.

It’s so funny.

Okay, sorry.

Sorry.