What are the Heebie Jeebies? What purpose do they serve?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and this week we've got three people from Aleph Insights, we've got Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill. And this week we're discussing the heebie-jeebies. So let's start off with Peter. Peter, what gives you the heebie-jeebies?

So there's been a recent spate of videos, particularly there's a couple of young Russian guys who climb incredibly tall buildings. Oh I hate that. And they go up the very tall building and then they climb the crane that's on top of the building and right out onto the edge and there's something quite thrilling about watching those videos and trying to get as big as you can on the screen and it just gives you this sort of horrible chilling feeling that almost as if you're there because it's so, the quality of the video is excellent and it's just incredibly kind of chilling.

You get that thing in your legs.

Yes, you get that fear. I don't know what that's all about. Like being on the edge of a cliff for real. Vicarious fear. Vicarious fear and it's incredible.

So where one heebie-jeebie is mild unease and 10 heebie-jeebies is total abject panic, how many heebie-jeebies does that give you?

Probably about a three. Right. It's not nearly as bad as, I've done quite a lot of hiking and stuff in the past and on very precarious ridges and things in Scotland and places and that is obviously much more genuinely scary and mountain biking across a narrow track with a big ravine on one side, that's up there as sort of 8, 9, 10 kind of heebie-jeebie levels. I'd say the 10 is probably where you would just become paralyzed. Yeah, total lockdown. Total lockdown, you just sort of, you can't move.

So hold on, before we go on, so are heebie-jeebies different from phobias?

I think they are because I think phobia, you know, phobia is kind of clinically defined to some extent and it's the point at which, you know, your aversion to the thing causing the fear is debilitating and, you know, it's locked into sort of chronic anxiety. So I think heebie-jeebies is less clinical.

And phobias are generally sort of less rational. So it might be a fear of something very specific like cauliflower. Okay, great. So we've clarified that. Nick, what gives you the heebie-jeebies?

Well, I mean, I don't think we've quite decided actually what the difference is, but I've got a weird phobia, which is, well, I don't have it anymore. But when I was a kid, I was really scared of the elephant man, Joseph Merrick. Very nice man, apparently. But nevertheless, the concept of the elephant man scared the hell out of me. I have no idea why. Well, he did look a bit funny. He was an unusual looking gentleman, there's no doubt about it. But when I told my friend Michael about this, he said, oh, that's really serious. It must have been hard to avoid him in everyday life. And yeah, I mean, it seems odd that you would even know that you had a phobia of something. But it was like I was very preoccupied. The lights were off. I would kind of imagine him being there. I couldn't even have the book in the room, you know. So yeah, that was quite used to be a lot of heebie-jeebies. And I still get a heebie-jeebie looking at pictures of the elephant man. But yeah, and apart from that, I mean, I've got obviously I've got spiders used to be a big thing with me, and I've trained myself out of that. But they but I think this is the unusual thing, actually, which we've touched on slightly, is the fact that you have an irrational response, which which you're able to inhibit. And I think I actually physiologically, that is how it works. That the amygdala responds with fear, often for reasons that you're not aware of. And and you can then but your prefrontal cortex, which is the sort of primary sort of conscious bit of your brain, you're able to actually kind of control, put a lid on the amygdala. So so I think I think. Yeah, so I think I think that's what's happened in those cases. I mean, if I look at a spider, I'm still I still get, you know, I still feel like I want to wrap my arms up and run away. Yeah, but I've but I've trained myself not to.

Do you get the same thing with photos of spiders?

Yeah. I mean, so this is the interesting. So one of the I mean, I've got direct personal experience of how this is a completely non conscious reaction. I remember very distinctly once I was in I was at university and in my room and I I suddenly realised that I had this panic response and I didn't I didn't know why. And I looked and I realised I looked down and there was a picture of a palm tree which had eight fronds and looked like a spider. And my my the spider recognition bit of my brain had clearly just gone, oh, there's a spider there, you know, run away. But, you know, so that is completely non conscious. I hadn't even been aware. I wasn't thinking of the thought of a spider was not. But the reaction was there. The fear was there. But even the thought of of there being a spider there was not was not present. You know, do we want to broaden this out? We haven't found out what Chris is.

Yeah, I want to hear about Chris. I want to talk about myself. Chris. Well, obviously, I'm entirely fearless, but but but but that that not being quite true. I think my number one sort of anxiety, the thing that caused me most fear in my in my daily life is probably a slightly irrational fear of harm to my children. So in any in any set of circumstances, I always perceive a myriad of threats to, you know, if they're if they're sort of on a on a swing or, you know, if they're riding a bicycle, I envisage the 50 different scenarios that end in a trip to casualty.

But they'll be all right. They're all wrapped in cotton wool.

That's right.

I think wrapping a child in cotton wool would actually probably be very dangerous. Yeah, they'd overheat. Yeah, it's an unusual expression. Yeah. Yeah. OK, I thought you were going to say, you know, that's pretty mild. I mean, the things that you're scared of are pretty mild. But also that's that is really quite rational. I mean, that's that's just is rational.

But I think I think the the extent to which I I cannot I simply cannot prevent myself if I've conceived of a hazard. I can't prevent myself from mentioning that hazard and saying just, you know, just watch out for the leaf on that tree over there that might fall in your eye, you know, and and that clearly is not rational, but it's something I'm unable to.

So there's a heightened sense beyond the normal parental.

My wife would definitely say it is beyond the normal sense of.

And your wife's quite relaxed about this stuff.

Yes. Yeah, certainly more so than I am. Yeah. I mean, she's not she's not putting them on motorbikes without helmets or anything.

Anyway, what's your heebie-jeebie then? So my heebie-jeebie is well, my phobia is wasps. Oh, no, no. I hate those guys. Yeah. I mean, they're one of the few animals that I will actually I'm better these days. I tend to try not to kill them. But they just it's that exactly what we're talking about. That sort of beating heart, that sort of adrenaline going, that sort of skin crawling thing. And even just a picture of them just. How many times have you been stung? Quite a few times. But they are totally and utterly reprehensible organisms. I mean, there's just no there's no rationale for them at all. Right. And what annoys me is that whereas they're, you know, cousins, the bees are, you know, happily minding their own business in very industrious, making honey, which they don't seem to object too much to us eating. And wasps are just thieves. They just try and steal, steal ketchup and jump on my chips.

And the critical element, I think, is that, you know, bees have got a one a one shot you know, sting, whereas and that's it. You know, it's it's it ends their life and the wasps can go on and on.

Yeah, but it's not just that. It's their design. Right. I mean, looking at a wasp and that that bright yellow. Yeah, kind of that pointy end. Yeah, it's almost advertising the sting. Yeah. And last year in my kitchen, we discovered a hornet. My God, I nearly fainted. It was it was literally about two inches long. It's a fearsome creature. Yeah, it scared the hell out of me. So it's like the it's the sort of animal equivalent of wearing a muscle tee and a sort of baseball cap and having a pitbull. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I said something about us sort of liberal North London type people. But so I guess, you know, the question is, what's the point of all this? So or I mean, where do we want to take this? What direction we want to say? Well, I think it's interesting that we have we have obviously sort of specialized software for specific phobias. So we have, you know, we have a spider detecting algorithm perpetually running in our brain. Likewise with snakes, you know, and even likewise with so people who give you the creeps, for example, which I think is closest to probably what we mean by heebie jeebies that a particular place just, you know, freaks you out or a particular person you find creepy is probably not too dissimilar to that. It's going to be some kind of some kind of process in our brain, looking for indications of danger and risk and so on and looking for social cues, all of these things that we probably evolved to do. The thing I find interesting is why why we have phobias about about sort of things, things like guns and nuclear weapons and flying, which we haven't evolved to, you know, to to to be scared of. And yet we still have a kind of, you know, a physiological type of reaction to them. So can you learn phobias?

Yeah, I think I think you can. And in fact, often often they well, they're not they're not inherited, but they are they are learned from from parents. So, you know, quite, quite often as you start flapping around when a wasp comes in, you know, your children can can learn that equally. You can learn them from your own experience. So, you know, if you have a a particularly disturbing childhood experience with a with a wasp or a spider or something, then that can that can be the kernel that starts a phobia or even things outside our direct experience or off our families directors. But those those we might learn from, you know, now with with kind of mass media, you can have sort of instructive acquisition of of of a phobia based on, you know, I'm terrified of terrorism or whatever it might be. I've never seen any terrorism. I don't know anyone who's seen any terrorism, but I am terrified of it because I've you know, I've seen lots of material that tells me this is a terrifying. Yeah.

And I think even in in sort of working in business life, a lot of decision making I've observed. So people worrying about whether or not they're going to make a profit or whether or not a particular contract is going to be worth pursuing because there's a chance of winning it and it's profitable. Often the decision making appears rather than be sort of hard fact and database and entirely rational. Often it's kind of like, well, I got a good feeling about this. And, you know, and it's it's almost as if their brain has over the course of their working life and all the experiences distill all that knowledge down into a into an algorithm that runs in the background that gives them a good or a bad feeling about about whether or not to do something.

And and this is why I think, you know, you should sort of the question really for me is whether the heebie-jeebies should be embraced or marginalised in in decision making. You know, to what extent should we should we incorporate them into the decision making process or dismiss them as, you know, being entirely irrational?

Well, didn't I mean, I think Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book about this, didn't he, Blink, which is sort of making the argument for intuition basically as a kind of means of informing judgments that your brain is capable of making, of jumping to the correct conclusion. And often an attempt to rationalise it will will deviate you away from that conclusion. You know, I think he used the example of, you know, someone who's looking, appraising a piece of art and and just sort of feels like it. No, it's not. It is not a Monet. And it can't really explain why they think it isn't. But we'll turn out to be correct. And, you know, I think we've all been in a situation where you can where you sort of your first reaction turns out to have been correct. And you've talked your way out of it, you know. And yeah, I mean, I mean, so I think there is a good argument for at least listening to it. But at the same time, you have to you've got to you've got you've got to not base everything on it. Right. Because we know that sometimes the heebie-jeebies are wrong.

Yeah, I think it's potentially a sensible strategy is to allow your heebie-jeebie to offer you a hypothesis, which you then test against other hypotheses. So if the heebie-jeebie says, don't do this thing, that's the hypothesis there as well to not do it is better. So but the other can't be the account hypothesis as well to do it is better. So you've got two hypotheses which you can imagine with directed data collection.

I'm now imagining it almost like a little an office in your brain, a specialist office filled with people who basically spend most of their time asleep and sometimes jump up and panic and wave their arms around. And, you know, they'll sometimes sort of wake up and send a message to your conscious brain.

You see, I think that's a great analogy, because I think I think, you know, it does create a physiological response. You know, when you when you spy something that gives you the heebie-jeebies, you know, the sympathetic nervous system kicks in and you get all that, you know, increasing heart rate and breathing and sweating and, you know, sort of narrowing of focus, all things which are which are useful to do. But also, you know, other physiological reactions. It seems that we have evolved a sort of rational risk assessment mechanism. If you if you take, for example, walking across a plank that's just, you know, six inches off the ground that you feel, OK, what are the what are the chances of me falling off this? Not really very, very high. And you can quite easily walk across it. If you then place that plank at, you know, 100 feet off the ground, you you can actually your your your motor control is affected by that. You are, you know, potentially paralyzed and unable to do that. The probability of it going wrong hasn't increased. But what has increased is the consequence of you of you getting it wrong. And it seems that I'm sort of fascinated by the not only the cognitive element, but the physiological mechanisms to to prevent you from from taking increased increased risk. Well, I want to talk about that.

There's an example I want to talk about, which I think sort of might inform our discussion. And it's this idea of physiological responses and connection with evolution and danger. Some years ago, there was an experiment carried out with chimpanzees, right, where you had two sets of chimpanzees, one one who had been captured from the wild and one who had been reared in captivity. And what the scientists did is, first of all, they they got the first. So chimpanzees from the wild group one, they were in a cage and they showed them and they revealed a cage next to them full of snakes. Okay. And the chimpanzees went bananas in a bad way. And then they showed them they showed them some bananas and then they they calmed right down. Okay. And so then what they did was they second set of chimps reared in in captivity. They showed them they revealed a cage full of snakes. Nothing happened. Okay. So they didn't react to the snakes. And so then what they did is they put, yeah, they got the two sets of chimps right next to each other. And they revealed to the first set who were frightened of snakes, they revealed some snakes to them. And group B chimpanzees could see the first set of monkeys and they could also see the snakes. Were they monkeys or chimpanzees? Chimpanzees. And so sorry. And so the first set of chimpanzees, again, sort of were went hysterical. And the second group reacted to that as well and also became agitated. And then with the second group on their own, sorry, this is like convoluted, but it goes somewhere. It's more complicated than I think it actually is. Yeah, well, hold on. It is actually. What you're saying is that the is that the chimpanzees learned to be scared of snakes. Wait, wait, wait. And so then they repeated the experiment. And so with the chimpanzees who hadn't previously been frightened of snakes, were frightened of snakes, presumably because they'd learned it from the first set. But here's where it gets interesting. So they then, again, with these two groups next to each other, they revealed a set of snakes to the first group. It sounds like they must have had a lot of snakes.

Did anyone check on if these snakes were happy about this whole thing? They were terrified of the chimpanzees.

But in a sort of they had set up some kind of mirror or some kind of process like this where the second group thought that the first group of chimpanzees were actually looking at a cage full of bunny rabbits. Right. And so they saw the chimpanzees scared out of their minds of bunny rabbits. Right. And so then they did a fourth experiment where they got this second group. Right. Group, group, group B, right? Yeah, so group B reared in captivity. The second group thought the first group were looking at bunny rabbits when they were looking at snakes or the other way around. Yeah. Yeah. And so and they revealed a cage full of bunny rabbits. OK. Having seen the first group be really scared of what they thought was bunny rabbits. So my question to you is this. How did the second group react? Right. Well, my prediction. So I think probably they didn't react, which makes. So if that's true, then that would suggest that you can only teach yourself to be scared of things that are actually scary. But I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. What do you guys think? So you're quite right. They didn't react to the rabbits. And so the point is exactly as you said, is that we have this idea. Oh, we're conditioned to sort of be scared of things that are dangerous to us. And that's only true if it can. Yeah. I mean, the right thing needs to trigger it. We can't just be scared of anything. Right. I mean, I think so. Yeah. So it has to map to. Does this inform our discussion? Obviously, there are things that we are sort of, let's say, scared of, you know, things like, you know, getting cancer from smoking or, you know, the reason we put our seatbelts on, because we're worried of crashing. But they don't. We have to. We really have to learn that. I mean, we don't have an instinctive. I don't think. I mean, probably there are people who do have a phobia of crashing their car. But really, it's not an instinctive reaction. But obviously, that is and that feels qualitatively different to me to the kind of reaction you get when you look at a spider or an elephant man, you know, that which is a kind of. So I wonder if it's. You mean that elephant man standing behind you? I think the reason the reason that you that you are that we have fear of things like flying or exams is because they map onto things. We are able to map them and perceive them as something which actually is is something we've evolved to be scared of. So, you know, exams, let's say it's kind of fear of losing status. Public speaking, you know, is something which is where people are scared of it, because it's you know, we have evolved to be very afraid of losing status in a group. And that is that kind of thing. What about clowns? Well, I guess I would say actually being scared of clowns because of the makeup and everything is hard to to interpret their facial expressions. And I think that's it's like people wearing masks. It's inherently frightening because we can't we lack some important information.

And we're also we're also evolved to be slightly wary of people who look either ill or strange or diseased. So with, you know, with with pale makeup and red lips or someone who's smiling and

you know that there's not a reason for them to be smiling. Yeah, yeah.

And they're carrying a bucket of confetti.

Exactly. And a clown dressed as the elephant man. No, thanks. Carrying a spy there. Not my bag at all.

Yeah, I mean, I think I think so. So we talked about most of us, those those those of us who are, you know, the majority who who get the heebie-jeebies about whatever it might be. But I think there's an interesting group of people who actively seek out the heebie-jeebies. Those Russian guys climbing out on the on the scaffolding or, you know, extreme sports enthusiasts and people on I'm a celebrity. Get me out of here.

Yes, that doing doing the things with with buckets, putting their hands in buckets of tarantulas. Exactly.

Those those people who are who are, you know, termed kind of thrill seekers or whatever. I think that that's an interesting, you know, niche in in in society. And they must they must serve a purpose for us.

Yeah, I like roller coasters, for example, which is totally all it's doing is exploiting our instinctive fear response, you know, which is which is arousing and fun.

Yeah, and obviously, rationally, you can tell yourself the roller coaster is, you know, much safer than lots of other other things. But it but it feels it feels scary. But there are people who do genuinely dangerous things that feel scary because they're genuinely dangerous. And they continue to push, you know, as soon as they've sort of sensitized themselves to, well, that was really dangerous. But but now I'm used to that. So I want to do something really, really dangerous now. I think that that sort of that fear addiction is a really interesting thing and only seems to, you know, it's a small amount of people within society who who engage in those kind of activities. But they must be they they must be doing something for for all of us. You know, they're the person who's the first one to taste a particular berry or whatever a spear at the mammoth.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, but I think they must that I mean, you wouldn't have evolved that you wouldn't have evolved it. You wouldn't have evolved it, you know, to serve the group. They would have to you'd have to get some sort of personal. I mean, my theory would be that you well, we know that, for example, women find risk taking in men attractive. So, you know, there there there has to be some reward for you, you know, whether it's whether it's being getting higher status for some reason from taking or getting the biggest bit of the mammoth. Exactly.

Why does there have to be an individual award? Why can't it be a social award?

So if you know, it's just that I think the idea that there's group selection is is has been kind of this disproved and and and mathematically, you know, it doesn't it does. It's not a coherent idea you because you could free ride free riding free riding would outcompete. Right.

You know, doing but equally, it's clearly not a universal evolutionary niche to to adopt because otherwise we'd all be, you know, bungee jumping with.

Yeah, I think the point is that with a with a popular I mean, the idea, the principle would be that in a population of complete sort of risk averse people, there is some advantage to being risk loving and vice versa. So in other words, we're at some kind of stable equilibrium where both strategies are, you know, are kind of, I mean, assuming that it works like that. I mean, assuming that we have some kind of slider for risk tolerance. Um, well, look, can I just mention some weird phobias? Yes. Chromatophobia. Fear of colors. Yeah. Decider phobia. Decision. Globophobia.

Fear of everything.

No, it's actually very balloons. Kumpuna phobia. Fear of buttons. I don't know if that's buttons that you press or buttons that you kind of wear. But there's Pogona phobia, which is fear of beards and trypophobia, which is quite an interesting one. That's that's a fear of textures with holes in them. Like like airtex. Yes. Kind of that fishnet ties that look a bit. Basically, it kind of reminds people of diseased flesh. And so so, you know, there's a whole like Reddit subreddit, which is all about this, where people put pictures of kind of poppy like poppy seed heads, for example, evoke this. They have they have these horrible looking holes in them, you know, and yeah. So anyway, there you go. Lots of interesting, interesting, interesting phobias out there.

I don't like felt. You mean Mark Felt? Or just. I mean, the textile felt. How do you feel about velour? That's OK. It's felt tennis balls. I'm sort of.

They're not made of felt. Now you've said that I'm feeling a bit icky at the thought of touching a tennis ball. Yeah. What's going on? You've given me tennis ball phobia.

Does it remind you of terrible tennis lessons at school or something? I don't know.

It's the feel of them. It's something a bit sort of tacky about them, isn't it? Like sticky kind of feeling.

I don't get it with tennis balls, but I do get it with a similar feeling with glass wall.

Oh, that squeaky, the squeaky.

Yeah, squeaky. But it's also it's actually quite painful and it cuts you and it's itchy and it's it's nasty.

Yeah, we've got through the whole podcast without mentioning nails on a blackboard, which. We haven't now. Yeah. Apparently, I don't know if this is true, but I recall that that deaf people don't like watching people scrape their nails on the blackboard. So, you know, it's not just the sound. It's something about the activity. But yes, I mean, nails on a blackboard. That's the worst, isn't it? OK, all right. We'll we'll we'll we'll finish things off there. Thanks, as always, to listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. We've been here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill. I'm Fraser McGruer. Thank you very much.

Goodbye.