water, flashlights, batteries, canned soup and canned meat”). 13 But it’s also true that if there’s even a remote possibility of extreme weather, these retailers are lightning quick to erect huge front-of-store displays of everything from bottled water to power generators to shovels to mosquito nets, pulling in a tidy profit in the process.
Why “Thrillers” Thrill
F ear is an interesting, complex, and not altogether unpleasant emotion. Do you remember the delicious thrill you felt as a kid when you watched your first horror movie—whether it was
The Blair Witch Project
or
The Shining
or
The Exorcist
? Your pulse probably raced, your heart likely beat wildly in your chest, and you may have found yourself involuntarily holding your breath as you waited for that ax-wielding killer to jump out of the shadows. You were scared out of your mind, and you loved every minute of it. It’s not just horror movies and scary urban legends that deliver this delicious thrill. Ever wonder why Stephen King has sold more than five hundred million copies of his books over the years, or why on
Publishers Weekly
’s list of best-selling books in 2009, a staggering thirteen of the top fifteen fell under the category of thriller? 14 As the popular media gossip blog Gawker.com noted sarcastically, American readers love being scared—of everything from Freemasons to lawyers to murderers to aliens to lawyers to pirates to even our northern neighbor, Canada. And what do you think is behind the enormous popularity of scary TV shows like
Bones
or
CSI
or even the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”? I read once that a human being’s chances of being eaten by a shark are smaller than his chances of being hit by a coconut fallingfrom a palm tree, but if you look at how many movies and TV shows feature shark attacks, you’d think otherwise.
Counterintuitive though it sounds, there’s a real biological basis behind our attraction to fear. Fear raises our adrenaline, creating that primal, instinctual fight-or-flight response. This in turn releases epinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that produces, as many “adrenaline junkies” will attest, a deeply satisfying sensation. There’s a substantial overlap between those brain areas involved in processing fear and pleasure,” said Allan Kalueff, a neuroscientist at the University of Tampere in Finland. Adds Yerkes National Primate Research Center neuroscientist Kerry Ressler, the amygdala, our brain’s “fear center,” “gets just as activated by fear as it would in the real world, but because your cortex knows you’re not in danger, that spillover is rewarding and not frightening.” 15
By uniting us against a common enemy, fear also brings humans together. It has a perverse yet delicious binding quality. It’s for this reason that we love to spread fearful rumors, sometimes blowing them out of all proportion just to heighten the sense of danger. Nothing travels as quickly as a frightening rumor—think of those ubiquitous urban legends about highway murder gangs and escaped convicts. Says Michael Lewis, director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, “Fear has a certain contagious feature to it, so the fear in others can elicit fear in ourselves. It’s conditioning, like Pavlov and the salivating dog.” 16
According to Harjot Singh, the senior vice president and director of planning at the marketing communications firm Grey Canada, our brains are hardwired to fear potential threats. 17 Professor Joseph LeDoux of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety at New York University concurs, explaining that “we come into the world knowing how to be afraid, because our brains have evolved to deal with nature.” 18
What’s more, as anyone can attest who’s ever had the bejesus scared out of them by the sound of a branch scratching on a windowpane on a windy night, fear is far more
Why “Thrillers” Thrill
F ear is an interesting, complex, and not altogether unpleasant emotion. Do you remember the delicious thrill you felt as a kid when you watched your first horror movie—whether it was
The Blair Witch Project
or
The Shining
or
The Exorcist
? Your pulse probably raced, your heart likely beat wildly in your chest, and you may have found yourself involuntarily holding your breath as you waited for that ax-wielding killer to jump out of the shadows. You were scared out of your mind, and you loved every minute of it. It’s not just horror movies and scary urban legends that deliver this delicious thrill. Ever wonder why Stephen King has sold more than five hundred million copies of his books over the years, or why on
Publishers Weekly
’s list of best-selling books in 2009, a staggering thirteen of the top fifteen fell under the category of thriller? 14 As the popular media gossip blog Gawker.com noted sarcastically, American readers love being scared—of everything from Freemasons to lawyers to murderers to aliens to lawyers to pirates to even our northern neighbor, Canada. And what do you think is behind the enormous popularity of scary TV shows like
Bones
or
CSI
or even the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”? I read once that a human being’s chances of being eaten by a shark are smaller than his chances of being hit by a coconut fallingfrom a palm tree, but if you look at how many movies and TV shows feature shark attacks, you’d think otherwise.
Counterintuitive though it sounds, there’s a real biological basis behind our attraction to fear. Fear raises our adrenaline, creating that primal, instinctual fight-or-flight response. This in turn releases epinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that produces, as many “adrenaline junkies” will attest, a deeply satisfying sensation. There’s a substantial overlap between those brain areas involved in processing fear and pleasure,” said Allan Kalueff, a neuroscientist at the University of Tampere in Finland. Adds Yerkes National Primate Research Center neuroscientist Kerry Ressler, the amygdala, our brain’s “fear center,” “gets just as activated by fear as it would in the real world, but because your cortex knows you’re not in danger, that spillover is rewarding and not frightening.” 15
By uniting us against a common enemy, fear also brings humans together. It has a perverse yet delicious binding quality. It’s for this reason that we love to spread fearful rumors, sometimes blowing them out of all proportion just to heighten the sense of danger. Nothing travels as quickly as a frightening rumor—think of those ubiquitous urban legends about highway murder gangs and escaped convicts. Says Michael Lewis, director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, “Fear has a certain contagious feature to it, so the fear in others can elicit fear in ourselves. It’s conditioning, like Pavlov and the salivating dog.” 16
According to Harjot Singh, the senior vice president and director of planning at the marketing communications firm Grey Canada, our brains are hardwired to fear potential threats. 17 Professor Joseph LeDoux of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety at New York University concurs, explaining that “we come into the world knowing how to be afraid, because our brains have evolved to deal with nature.” 18
What’s more, as anyone can attest who’s ever had the bejesus scared out of them by the sound of a branch scratching on a windowpane on a windy night, fear is far more
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