Scared of spiders

Have you ever walked into a room or location and things have not felt right ?

More importantly do you listen or react to that feeling ?

Most people have different levels of personal awareness this can often boil down to the following factors:

How you have been brought up or indeed where you have been brought up. Your life experiences and personal ethics also play a part in the way you view the world, and react to different situations.

If i could give you one piece of advice that we hope you will live by it is this:-

“Never ignore your instinct”

How many of you are scared of spiders or snakes, lots i bet anything bigger than a communal garden worm and i will leave smoking boots as they hit the speed of sound running.

You know there is a reason whilst these insects and serpents cause us fear it’s down to that instinctive area of the brain.

In basic terms the instinctive area of the brain is active as soon as you are born. It’s an area of the brain that has kept us as a race of people alive for millions of years, it instantly makes you aware of danger

This part of the brain activates when things didn’t seem quite right it the Limbic area of the brain that gives you that feeling, if we were to go back millions of years we listened to it and used it religiously let’s face it trying to reason with a spear and loin cloth whilst faced with a tyrannosaurus rex was not always advisable.

So what it gave us was a unique defence system that has served us well throughout history.

Of course in modern times the likely hood of walking down the road and turning a corner and coming face to face with a marauding dinosaur is highly unlikely so there for we have grown to ignore the instinctive response sometimes referred to as the 6th sense.

But it still serves us well, a lot of people have a fear of snakes and spiders, that fear comes from the limbic system (Instinct) even though snakes and spiders are rarely seen we still fear them from the most primitive part of our brain you see these are the things that killed lots of people and still do, we all know that the mighty t-Rex was extinct millions of years before man was walking the earth, so a big risk to us was the spider and the snake that’s why you still fear the little critters for those of you that like spiders and snakes you are obviously from a different planet.

A little story for you

I remember when one of the Protaris team was in the Steaming jungles of Latin America, this particular team member mentioning no names (Andy) had a very acute fear of snakes, whilst he was resting one of the team put a piece of rope over his boots and then uttered the words snake don’t move. I’ve never seen anything like it smoking boots was an understatement leaves vines and equipment were all propelled into the thick jungle with the him sprinting at high speed into the undergrowth, a short while later he came back looking like the most ancient part of the forest. “It was a piece of rope” said one of the team his prefrontal cortex replied “I know that”. Incidentally we are still finding leaves on him now.

In our next blog we will describe the two areas of the brain that affect our judgments in risky situations