The Book of Phobias and Manias

in 2018 a team of neuroscientists from Japan, Hong Kong and the US tried an alternative: a therapy for zoophobia that bypasses the conscious mind.

To start with, the researchers used the new technique of ‘hyper-alignment decoding’ of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to identify the brain patterns associated with particular animals in a group of non-phobic people. Armed with these codes, the scientists used the fMRI scanner to monitor the brains of seventeen individuals who each had a phobia of at least two animals. Each participant was shown a grey disc, which grew larger whenever the activity in his or her ventral cortex matched
the pattern of code corresponding to one of those two animals. As an incentive for the subjects to dwell on whatever they were thinking about at those moments, the researchers told them that the bigger the disc, the greater the financial reward they would receive for taking part in the study.

The participants were not consciously thinking of their feared animals when the code was spotted. Even after five sessions, they could not tell which animals had been targeted by the scanner. Nonetheless, their phobia of the targeted creatures, as measured by bodily responses such as skin conductivity, had reduced significantly, while their fear of the control animals remained intact.

‘This study provides evidence,’ say the researchers, ‘that physiological fear responses to specific, subclinical, naturally occurring fears can be reduced unconsciously with hyperalignment decoders, completely outside the awareness of human subjects.’ The zoophobes had learned to associate their once-feared animals with reward, while not knowing that the creatures had even crossed their minds.

A single Viceroy tulip, according to a contemporary writer, was traded for four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tuns of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes, a silver cup and a large quantity of wheat and rye.

In the Journal of Marine Science in 2020, a group of biologists warned that thalassophobia poses a threat to the planet. Our fear of the deep sea, they claim, stops us from fighting to preserve it. The layer of ocean that lies more than 20,000 feet below the surface – named the ‘hadal zone’, after Hades, the ruler of the Greek underworld – is disproportionately harmed by trawling and mining, by the dumping of plastics, sewage and radioactive waste