We’re in a Giant Fear-Conditioning Experiment
Your brain is working overtime to keep you safe right now
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
Your brain, conditioned to fear (and working to keep you alive) 😱
Your brain is working overtime to keep you safe right now. It has adjusted to a whole new reality and learned in a relatively short amount of time that what was once benign is now dangerous. For many people, these new fear associations are so strong they can even be triggered when the threat isn’t imminent. Has your stomach clenched during a concert scene in a movie? Or did looking at pictures of the Rose Garden Supreme Court nomination ceremony make you recoil? That’s your brain’s learned fear response in action.
A fear of crowds isn’t inherent — most of us didn’t have this response to large groups of people pre-Covid-19. So, how did we develop this new anxiety so quickly?
Over the past seven months, the country has taken part in a giant fear-conditioning experiment. We have learned that crowds are a…
