If beehives, ant holes, lotus seed heads and even crumpets give you the heebie-jeebies, you're not alone, and you may be suffering from trypophobia, or the fear of clustered holes, and researchers from the Centre for Brain Science at the University of Essex have discovered that there's an evolutionary basis for our collective phobia, NPR reports.
"Tryprophobia is the most common phobia you've never heard of," Geoff Cole, a psychologist at the University of Essex and a self-diagnosed trypophobic, told NPRS's Shots. In an attempt to understand why clustered holes gave him and many others such an unpleasant visceral reaction, Cole and his colleague Arnold Wilkins led an investigation in an attempt to uncover the phobia's evolutionary roots.
In the new study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Cole and Wilkins, both vision scientists, wrote that "there may be an ancient evolutionary part of the brain telling people that they are looking at a poisonous animal." Our ancestors may have conditioned themselves to fear animals with certain markings in order to survive, as on a physical level, they appear "unnatural."
To test this hypothesis, the researchers compared 76 images of trypophobic objects found on a trypophobia site to 76 images of holes not associated with the phobia as controls. They discovered that trypophobic objects have a unique visual quality to them, a "high contrast energy at midrange spatial frequencies in comparison to the control images."
"You can take any image and break it down into its core fundamental components meaningful to the visual system," Cole told Shots. "This would be things like luminance, contrast, wavelength of light."
One tryophobic sufferer told Cole that a a blue-ringed octopus, one of the world's most poisonous animals, had set off a very visceral reaction in him. This prompted the researchers to observe images of numerous poisonous animals including the blue-ringed octopus, king cobra snake and deathstalker scorpion. They found that like the trypophobic objects they had analyzed, such animals also have a high contrast energy at midrange spatial frequencies, the distribution of clustered, circular patterns on their bodies triggering a trypophobic reaction.
"We think that everyone has trypophobic tendencies even though they may not be aware of it," Cole told NPR. "We found that people who don't have the phobia still rate trypophobic images as less comfortable to look at than other images."
Sufferers from trypophobia have reported feeling intense anxiety, nausea and shaking when confronted with a triggering visual.
To further investigate their hypothesis, the researchers are now manipulating the spectral characteristics of images of everyday objects to see what makes people prefer one image over another.
