Innate Fears: On Babies and Snakes

When I was young, my broth­er Ian and I would hike down to the Old Stone Church behind our house to wade in the large creek. One August we tot­ed inner tubes down and tied them to the trees on the bank so we could enjoy the “rapids” with­out veer­ing too far downstream. 

So, we’re float­ing along, sun­ning our faces, when all of the sud­den a fat black snake fell on top of me. He had appar­ent­ly been sun­ning him­self as well, but the tug of the rope shook him right out of the branch­es and onto my head. Can’t tell you what hap­pened next because I total­ly blacked out, so trau­ma­tized I went com­plete­ly dor­sal, flip­ping that ner­vous sys­tem sur­vival switch that has us pass out rather than face our real­i­ty. Ian said the snake swam away and I have no rea­son to doubt him. 

Anyway, I was shar­ing this sto­ry with a friend, and they com­ment­ed that this was a great ori­gin sto­ry for my hatred of snakes. I dis­agreed, say­ing that hat­ing snakes is an innate human instinct. Across cul­tures and his­to­ries, these slith­er­ing rep­tiles have been both revered and feared, appear­ing in myths, reli­gious texts, and cau­tion­ary tales. I argued that the mere sight of a snake trig­gers an almost pri­mal reac­tion of fear or dis­gust in almost all peo­ple. “Everyone hates snakes. From an evo­lu­tion­ary stand­point, isn’t it a sur­vival asset to instinc­tu­al­ly flee from some­thing that can bite and kill you? I mean, Satan him­self was a ser­pent in Genesis!” 

I was wrong. A few weeks lat­er, a dif­fer­ent friend sent me a video of babies and snakes. In this video, the babies and snakes get along famous­ly. These non-ven­omous snakes had been trained to be com­fort­able with peo­ple. The babies are curi­ous about the snakes, crawl­ing after them and rub­bing their faces. One baby picks a snake up and gen­tly gums it. Neither baby nor snake seems apprehensive. 

Then the sci­en­tists open blinds on a win­dow where now the babies can see their par­ents. The par­ents react to the snakes with plen­ty of appre­hen­sion. Every time a snake slith­ers near their child, one or both par­ents would make a face of dis­gust. Turns out, babies are very tuned into the dilat­ing and con­strict­ing of their loved one’s eyes and respond accord­ing­ly. Babies learn to fear by look­ing at their care­givers’ faces to see if they should be worried.

Basically, when the babies couldn’t see any adults, they were cool with the snakes. Once they noticed their par­ents seemed alarmed by the snakes, they began to cry and kick at the snakes.  Consider the advice about look­ing at a flight atten­dant dur­ing tur­bu­lence. Humans often look to those in charge to decide if we should feel fear or not.

 I have since learned that humans only have two innate (not learned) fears. One is a fear of heights (once depth per­cep­tion has devel­oped.) The oth­er fear is loud noises. 

I was wrong about the snakes, but I feel vin­di­cat­ed by the loud noises.

The world is get­ting loud­er all the time, and you’d bet­ter believe I have thoughts about it. Join me here next week to see why we all need to shut up.