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Experts, however, say a true phobic reaction is a whole different category of terror, a central nervous system wildfire that's impossible to mistake. In the face of the thing that triggers fear, phobics experience sweating, racing heart, difficulty breathing and even a fear of imminent death--all accompanied by an overwhelming need to flee. In addition, much of the time that they are away from the feared object or situation is spent dreading the next encounter and developing elaborate strategies intended to avoid it. "Jeanette," 44, a teacher's assistant, is so terrified of cats that she sends her daughter, 21, into an unfamiliar store to scout around and sound a feline all clear before she enters. The daughter has been walking point this way since age five. "Nora," 50, a social worker, will circumnavigate a block with a series of right turns rather than make a single left, so afraid is she of facing the stream of traffic that a left turn requires.
Most psychologists now assign phobias to one of three broad categories: social phobias, in which the sufferer feels paralyzing fear at the prospect of social or professional encounters; panic disorders, in which the person is periodically blindsided by overwhelming fear for no apparent reason; and specific phobias--fear of snakes and enclosed spaces and heights and the like. Of the three, the specific phobias are the easiest to treat, partly because they are the easiest to understand.
The human brain may be a sophisticated thing, but there is an awful lot of ancient programming still etched into it. For "Martin," 21, a dental student in London, Ontario, his fear of snakes is so overwhelming that he stapled together pages in a textbook to avoid flipping to a photo of a snake. He often wakes with nightmares that he is sitting in a bar or a stadium and suddenly sees a snake slithering toward him. "It's odd," he says, "because I'm not in situations where I would ever see snakes."
His brain, however--or at least the oldest parts of it--may have been. One of the things that helped early humans survive was a robust fear-and-flight response: an innate sense of the places and things that represent danger and a reflexive impulse to hightail it when one of them is encountered. When the species became top predator a few million years later, those early lessons were not easy to unlearn.
Contemporary researchers believe it's no coincidence that specific phobias usually fall into one of four subcategories, all of which would have had meaning for our ancient ancestors: fear of insects or animals; fear of natural environments, like heights and the dark; fear of blood or injury; and fear of dangerous situations, like being trapped in a tight space. "Phobias are not random," says Michelle Craske, psychologist at UCLA's Anxiety and Behavioral Disorders Program. "We tend to fear anything that threatens our survival as a species." When times change, new fears develop, but the vast majority still fit into one of the four groups.
It turns out that we process the fear of these modern menaces in the same area of the brain our ancient ancestors did--the paralimbic region, which mediates a whole range of primal responses, including anger and sexual arousal. "It seems that contemporary people learned from their ancient ancestors what to be afraid of and how to handle it," Barlow says.