The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0199930198
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The human reaction to insects is neither purely biological nor simply cultural. And no one reacts to insects with indifference. Insects frighten, disgust and fascinate us. Jeff Lockwood explores this phenomenon through evolutionary science, human history, and contemporary psychology, as well as a debilitating bout with entomophobia in his work as an entomologist. Exploring the nature of anxiety and phobia, Lockwood explores the lively debate about how much of our fear of insects can be attributed to ancestral predisposition for our own survival and how much is learned through individual experiences. Drawing on vivid case studies, Lockwood explains how insects have come to infest our minds in sometimes devastating ways and supersede even the most rational understanding of the benefits these creatures provide.
No one can claim to be ambivalent in the face of wasps, cockroaches or maggots but our collective entomophobia is wreaking havoc on the natural world as we soak our food, homes and gardens in powerful insecticides. Lockwood dissects our common reactions, distinguishing between disgust and fear, and invites readers to consider their own emotional and physiological reactions to insects in a new framework that he's derived from cutting-edge biological, psychological, and social science.
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this leads us to the next form of disgust. Hygiene: Insects as the Original Dumpster Divers If insects live in, consume, and emerge from sewage and garbage, it is easy to understand our revulsion. Hugh Raffles’s lyric essay includes “the nightmare of long, probing antennae from the overflow hole in the bathroom sink or, worse, the rim of the toilet.”36 The nasty cockroach emerging from the plumbing is arguably more disgusting, but rather less common, than a germy fly crawling on our potato salad.
of itchiness that gave rise to a persistent delusion that he was infested with caterpillars under his skin. With this move from misperception to false belief, we have one of the more tragic forms of an infested mind: delusory parasitosis. Perhaps the most famous case of delusory parasitosis is that of Salvador Dalí.22 The artist could induce hallucinatory states by a process he described as “paranoiac critical” and then use the subconscious images in his paintings. Perhaps if I had maintained and
parasitosis is recognizing that our real experiences are woven into our unreal beliefs. Often a patient has had some previous disturbing encounter with insects, such as an infestation of cockroaches, fleas, or lice.44 Then the person becomes hypervigilant, and every [ 96 ] The Infested Mind little tickle or itch becomes a tactile illusion—the first step onto a slippery slope toward delusion. In a kind of perversely self-fulfilling world of sensation, perception, and imagination, the individual
more readily. In another study, the coping strategy had no effect on the outcome of therapy, leaving the scientists to speculate that monitor types might intensify their experience to the point that it interferes with the therapeutic process. Finally, one might guess that arachnophobes with greater imagery ability would have a more intense experience and hence greater treatment success— at least with Wolpe’s traditional form of systematic desensitization.33 It is true that after therapy,