Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden’s Manual of Anatomy, or by the specific directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley’s Practical Physiology (Macmillan) or Morrell’s Comparative Anatomy, and Guide to Dissection (Longman & Co.).
Source: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
Visual phobias: My most terrifying fear
For years now I have experienced an incredibly intense, sudden, gut-wrenching fear over and over again. It almost always happens completely without warning, but always has the same basic cause. I can be blithely scrolling my dashboard on Tumblr, or happily flipping channels on cable, otherwise perfectly relaxed and at ease. Then in the next moment, totally unexpectedly, I am in the tightest, most visceral grip of fear, eyes and jaw slammed tightly shut, pulse racing, breath held, and my stomach clenched in wrenching knots. It usually takes minutes, sometimes hours, for the fear to pass.
What triggers these moments of abject terror? My entire body goes into instant panic mode every time I see images of any man-made object under water.
The last few days have been really intense because of the composite images of the Titanic debris field on the bottom of the Atlantic. They keep popping up unexpectedly on Tumblr and different news programs. A few weeks ago it was seeing the underwater rescue efforts in the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship. But it isn’t just limited to ocean liners. I feel it every time I encounter any photograph, any television show, any news footage, or any movie that depticts any object under water that shouldn’t be there.
Shipwrecks, antique cannons, sunken oil rigs, submarines, deep water robots, cement spheres for artificial reefs, the Pearl Harbor memorial, underwater sculpture gardens, dock pilings, propellers, sunken buoys, buildings submerged by dam projects, shark cages, cars, and sometimes the hull of a floating boat or ship viewed from under water, or shipwrecks on the beach.
I swim. I enjoy boats. I spent most of my teenage summers sailing. I enjoy underwater nature programs. I’m fine with watching people swimming or diving underwater. Bodies floating in the water don’t trigger it. I don’t specifically have any great fear of water or drowning. This is not the kind of fear that prevents me from functioning in the world. I just have to deal with the unexpected anxiety when certain images trigger the response.
I’ve seen the Poseidon Adventure, and even rooted for Shelley Winters as she made her daring final swim, but none of the scenes from that movie really showed the capsized ship itself. I absolutely cannot watch the opening sequence of Titanic, and I even ruined a perfectly good date once because of it (he thought I was such a wuss!), but I have no particular problem watching the ending as the ship plunges down into the ocean. Yet if the right type of image pops up unexpectedly, I will spend several minutes of a movie or a TV show frozen in fear with my eyes tightly closed, until the audio lets me know it has moved on to another scene.
I can remember being quite little and getting frightened if I was playing with a toy boat in the bathtub or wading pool and it turned upside down in the water. I can also remember some mild distress when sailing and coming close to very large ships. So this has plagued me in one form or another all of my life, and other than spotting the occasional snake or bug, or waking up with the occasional nightmare, I have no other unusual fears.
It was only a few years ago that I ever met anyone else with the same fear, when a co-worker and I were casually discussing the movie Titanic. Since then, a little Googling has shown me a few others with nearly identical triggers, which somehow makes it seem even more strange, not less. I find the neuroscience of fear to be fascinating, with unconscious pathways stimulating instantaneous physical responses even before the conscious mind knows what happened. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand this, and I doubt it’s an experience I could unlearn without a lot of effort, but the intensity of the subjective experience is always startlingly vivid.
Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs Put to the Test
“Anyone who has ever completed a psychology class has heard of Abraham Maslow and his theory of needs,” said University of Illinois professor emeritus of psychology Dr. Ed Diener, who led the study. “But the nagging question has always been: Where is the proof? Students learn the theory, but scientific research backing this theory is rarely mentioned.”
