Transcription
Fear is more mysterious than you think. Why do we know more about the moons in Saturn than we do about this emotion? Sure, the usual explanation is that fear helps us survive. That it's just the fight-or-flight response baked into our biology. But if that's all there is, then why do we celebrate it? Why do we actively create fear in our lives? Not just once or twice, but again and again like a tradition. Even scientists are baffled by this contradiction.
Fear is such a powerful emotion that is a driving force that invents culture and shapes how we live our lives. Don't believe me? Ask yourself, why do you even go to work? Why do you go to school? Why do we live the life that we do? If you trace it back far enough, the chances are it all comes from fear. And fear is not just one thing. It comes in levels. And if the most basic level is about survival, then what does the scariest level of fear look like? But what's weird is that the deeper you go, the more you realize how necessary it is. And in order to understand why, we need to start from level one.
The earliest form of fear can be seen in single-celled organisms. But the crazy thing is they don't feel fear like we do. They don't even have a brain. But their actions come from the same mean survive or die. In its most basic form, this is what fear means. That single instinct layered itself into neural networks into brains and after over millions of years eventually into consciousness. This is why the emotion of fear is considered the most ancient. But as we become more advanced, the fear of predators and darkness no longer rule over our lives. But if fear is supposed to protect us over something we need to avoid, then why do we watch horror movies? Isn't that a contradiction?
Well, not quite. A psychologist at Arizona State University found that there are three types of people who watch horror movies. The first group watches out of curiosity or as a way to test their bravery. The second group hates being scared but still chooses to watch them because they learn something about themselves in the process. And the third group actively seeks horror because it makes them feel alive. So what does this mean? It turns out fear does not just protect us, it also teaches us. And in order to understand how, we need to move to level two in order for it all to make sense.
The kind of fear that lingers even when the danger is gone. And we call this anxiety. Think of it as the echo of fear. The mind's way of staying alert even when there's nothing left to run from. And strangely, one of the most effective ways to manage it is through the fear itself. In the Netherlands, researchers developed a video game called Mindlight to help children with anxiety. It's a fascinating concept where the game uses EEG to track brain activity where the calmer the player becomes, the brighter their character's light shines. Darkness becomes the element of fear and monsters appear to scare the player. But if the player panics, a message appears teaching them how to calm down, how to face the darkness without running away. The results: children who regularly played the game showed reduced anxiety in their daily lives with improvements comparable to cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the gold standard for treating anxiety.
So maybe that's the real reason why we're obsessed with horror. Regardless of which type we are, fear helps us rehearse survival. It keeps our anticipatory engine active, training our brains to predict, adapt, and stay resilient in uncertainty. That's why in 2020, fans of horror movies showed greater resilience at the height of the pandemic. Because fear does not just prepare us for danger, it helps us live through it.
And at the same height of the pandemic, we invented a new genre of horror. One that fascinated not only the internet, but also scientists because it's unlike anything we've ever seen before. [Music] Images of empty malls, abandoned classrooms, and playgrounds under dim skies began spreading everywhere. Surreal scenes that looked almost like dreams. This aesthetic plays with nostalgia, but there's always something about it that feels terrifying at the same time. It's hard to explain. It feels like staring into a world that remembered us, but no longer need us.
During the pandemic, this strange new aesthetic began circulating online. And it wasn't an accident. We were living in a time of uncertainty where the world was trapped in a kind of space between what life was and what it would become. It was from this shared sense of uncertainty that the internet turned disorientation into culture called liminal space. What's fascinating is that we don't even need to do much to create that feeling of unease. Take any familiar room and slightly alter its proportions. Look at this example. Two kitchens nearly identical, but in one of them the scale is wrong. And already something inside us quietly recoils. The same thing happens when we multiply identical decorations in a space, like seeing the same chair clone across the room. It's not the kind of terror you feel when someone chases you down a hallway. It's a much more subtler, a whisper in the back of your mind saying, "You're not supposed to be here."
Believe it or not, this phenomenon was only recently confirmed scientifically in 2022 by researchers from Cardiff University. They found that our brains build internal models of how spaces are supposed to look and feel. When those patterns break, it triggers a prediction error, a kind of cognitive dissonance where the brain recognizes something as familiar yet simultaneously wrong. And that's what creates unease. This exact same mechanism appears when we see something that's almost human. To understand why liminal spaces unsettle us, we need to look at a 2019 neuroscience study on the uncanny valley. What they found is when robots have humanlike features, our likability toward them increases. But before reaching human level of realism, what's peculiar is that the likability drops sharply just before rising again once it reaches a one-to-one level of realism. And the activity in our brains mirrors what's happening. The VMPFC, the part of our brain responsible for tracking how much we like these human-like agents, mirrors that famous valley curve. Meanwhile, the amygdala, the brain's emotional alarm system, predicts whether we'll accept or reject them. The stronger the amygdala responds, the more likely we are to feel discomfort or rejection. Essentially, our brains calculate human likeness, assigning emotional value and then sound an alarm when something feels too close to real but is not. From this we can understand why liminal spaces unsettle us. Because just like how we reject almost human robots, we instinctively reject places that feel almost familiar but not quite.
So far the fears we have seen are all escapable. But what happens when a fear is so infinitely large that you just have to accept it? This level of fear is different from your average ghouls and zombies. This is about something so ancient, but even thinking about it long enough could drive you to madness. The terror here does not come from being haunted, but from being ignored. In this level of fear, humanity is irrelevant. Whatever happens to us, whether we achieve world peace and world hunger and conflict, none of it really matters because the horror at this level is so vast that our existence does not even register. The people in these stories are usually just set pieces where they don't get to change the outcome. They rarely even understand what's happening. So the conversation about winning or losing is irrelevant. This level of fear is just isolation and dread. A deep unshakable awareness that you are completely alone in a universe that does not care. A perfect illustration of this horror is in Junji Ito's Uzumaki, a town so obsessed with the concept of spirals where the more they try to understand it, the faster they're swallowed by it. This level of horror comes in two names, Lovecraftian horror and cosmic horror. And it's not a coincidence it's called cosmic horror either because it hints to the fact that like all of the previous levels of horror we have seen, this level of horror too is in fact real.
You've probably seen those videos showing the scale of the universe where if we zoom out enough, the earth becomes a spec like a grain of sand compared to Sahara. But even that is not a close enough example. The observable universe is so incomprehensibly huge that it breaks your brain just trying to hold the idea. It is so massive that even the fastest known object in the universe is considered painfully slow. But why does this matter? Because everything that we see around us, including the stars, requires light. So if it takes billions of years for light to travel to those stars we see in the night sky, then that would mean some of the stars we see in the sky might not even be there anymore. And this is what level four is about. The crushing realization that we are powerless, that we live in a universe too big to care and too complex to understand. So how do we even cope with this level of fear? By living meaningfully. Because in order to cope with a level of fear larger than the universe, regardless of how insignificant we are, the reason why we exist has to have a meaning. From this, cultures are born, traditions, beliefs, and even morality. And this is what separates us from animals. By living in this sphere, we do what we do. And at the same time, it's what made us thrive for millions of years.
But if the universe is the biggest thing we have ever seen or we could ever imagine, then what is even bigger than the universe? Everything from cells to stars follows the same mathematical rules. Every breath, every galaxy, every chemical reaction are all governed by invisible laws, which opens up a terrifying possibility. If the universe runs on laws, then could it be simulated? This is where Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis comes in. This theory suggests that we might already be inside a simulation, one that is built by an advanced civilization. I know this sounds insane, but here's the logic behind this theory. If future civilizations can simulate entire realities with billions of conscious minds inside, then those simulated minds would vastly outnumber the original ones. Statistically, it becomes far more likely that we are simulated than we are real. And if that's true, then everything we've ever known, every memory, every emotion, every person you've ever loved could be just a string of code. A program running for someone else's entertainment. This is fear at its most extreme, where insignificance is not just cosmic, it's fabricated. While religion gives us meaning in an indifferent universe, the simulation theory suggests that there was never any meaning to begin with.
And as wild as this sounds, Bostrom is not alone. Some scientists are now designing real experiments to test it. Like what if the simulation has limits? Maybe the laws of physics are not fixed. Maybe they drift like patches in software. While others think space and time might be pixelated, broken into pieces so small we haven't detected them yet. Like trying to spot pixels on a screen too high-res for our eyes. If we ever detect a glitch, it won't prove the simulation just yet, but it will shatter everything we thought we knew about reality. And that's the heart of level five. Not the fear of death or ghosts. It's the fear that everything were never real to begin with.