Jason Silva on Fear | Brain Games

fear is connected to the fight-or-flight
response and that it’s a sort of a
nervous system response is characterized
by a rush of adrenaline that’s meant to
quickly make you react and decide if you
are going to fight this danger or flee
this danger this is something that we
have inherited this isn’t biologically
selected for because it proved useful to
our survival in more dangerous time when
we were running through the savannahs of
Africa and a tiger suddenly lunged from
the forest
you needed quick fight-or-flight and I
take this Tiger what do I run from this
tiger but it needed to be instantaneous
almost like a reflex so I think fear is
tapped into that we all know that and we
all have felt afraid in our lives and
it’s a feeling that in many ways you
think we want to avoid we want to avoid
fear panic and desire to avoid it on the
other hand we’ve kind of like hack our
own nervous system response because we
have this very meta brains we have this
ability to create these contexts in
which we simultaneously and scare
ourselves while knowing that we’re safe
the appeal of scary movies I want a
scary movie to freak me the hell out
because on a meta level I know
everything’s fine we can hack into the
fight-or-flight response and enjoy the
rush of fear if we know that that fear
is in the safe context thus the appeal
of skydiving haunted house and scary
movies anything is amazing because it’s
gonna testament to our ingenuity we’ve
infused our own fight-or-flight response
with narrative fear now has sort of
extended consciousness to it we’re so
smart we hack our own like engineering
designs it’s amazing
you
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