familiar sensations were: my rapid pulse, put on my chest, my attention narrowing. These were the feelings that I had many times in my life when most exposed heights, a ladder or walk down a steep path. I heard during the long moments, lying on a serious car accident, rolling on the road and hail in a ditch on a mountain, and I again heard months later, when I’m driving on the ice sidewalk or around a tight turn. I had heard in the late evening moments of uncertainty, wakes up at home along a dark road with a car in the vicinity of inactivity, or alone in my apartment, ask if the strange noise he had heard me, it was a dream or reality. However, this time was not doing all these things. I was standing in the hallway canned goods in the grocery store, staring at the shelves almost empty. In Yukon, a region in northern Canada that still had to take his first known case of COVID-19 is just a left poultry stock cardboard. I was trying to tell me that the situation was funny, trying to avoid eye contact with other buyers, like this I grabbed a box. I could feel our collective malaise. So often we are afraid in relation to describe the disease is called spreading fear like a virus running through a crowd; There is talk of infected by fear. It might be a cliché, but it turns out, studies suggest that it is true: really contagious fear. We’ve long known that animals “smell” each other, but to fear in the popular imagination, we tend to think of predators, sniffing the fear of their prey. This is a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. What really happened that prey on silent, invisible inadvertently issue “alarm pheromones.” These are the chemical signals Air companions should warn over dangers nearby. Until recently it was not clear whether this was an opportunity that was limited to the wild world, an instinct that people had lost in the march away from nature. The studies were made on the basis of observed behavior that suggested humans emit pheromones and sensor alarm may be able. But it was more than a team of scientists found clear evidence physiological something a decade ago, the phenomenon is available. “We kind of decided to do the first rigorous test whether human pheromones exist alarm,” Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, the principal investigator of the study in 2009, he said. Your team used an unorthodox experimental technique: they sent parachuting people. collected Mujica-Parodi and colleagues sweat samples of 144 people who were to experience a tandem jump for the first time. He then uses the same 144 people as their own controls, collect their sweat after running on a treadmill. Later, they put two sets of welding samples on a new set of test subjects to see fMRI brain scans and converts the pheromones in real time. The “fear sweat” the activity generated in the brain structure of amygdalas-small subjects to be critical in the supply, is known and to manage our response to fear. The exercise of sweat. In a second phase of the experiment already amygdala reactivity has been demonstrated in response to cold sweat, the team investigate the behavioral component of the amygdala response. They put the subjects or sweat or the exercise of sweat, while showing a series of human faces images to convey a spectrum of expressions ranging from vacuum too angry. When you asked to evaluate each image or threaten appear neutral or inhalation exercise assessed threat, subject only angry faces as potential threats. But if inhaled sweat fear, were included as dangerously close significantly more likely all the range that fear, sweating increased vigilance in subjects primed to vote. He each other really scared “smell”, suggests their research. And chemical alarm system can prepare our brain to respond to incoming threats. This may explain why we sometimes see, we go into a room and suddenly heard a warning-this sense of a climate still clearly threatening or unexplained mood. It could also help make sense of palpable tension in the air to explain these days when someone coughs near or when we realize that the nave toilet paper is eerily empty. I thought a lot in recent days Mujica-Parodi research, when I canceled due to necessary care plans and look forward scroll purchased through new endless stories and social media messages about the spread of the virus. This may sound strange, but think about it comforts me. Ours are an important reminder alarm pheromones: the fear is built into us for a reason, and it is O. K. hear. It is a survival mechanism, and should not only help you survive as individuals, but they survive our communities for help. It ‘s simple, the idea of the fear of contagious infectious diseases fear of being seen as negative. We spend so much time as a culture of ignoring talk of oppression, to defeat, to overcome and heal our fears. But our fear is a finely calibrated alarm system, such as a smoke detector as a disease. In this full-time, it makes sense to hear the siren. Do not panic, but to hear the official medical consultation and preparation Picture copyright by Al Bello Getty Images
How fear can spread like a virus
