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  • Can I ask you a personal question? How do you feel about clusters of small holes?

  • Does the look of baby Swiss cheese give you the heebie jeebies? What about the little

  • air bubbles in a frying pancake, or the inside of a wasp nest, or the patterns in this coral,

  • or this lotus pod?

  • Does this image make you throw up a little in your mouth? Well then, friend, you may

  • have trypophobia -- the fear of clusters of small holes.

  • Phobias are persistent, irrational fears of particular objects or situations, the causes

  • of which are often unknown.

  • In the bigger picture, being afraid of holes isn't that weird. I mean, people are afraid

  • of all sorts of crazy stuff. One etymologist has been collecting the names of phobias for

  • nearly thirty years, and his list currently contains hundreds of odd fears, including

  • fear of the moon, of beards, of pooping, puppets, numbers, vegetables, bicycles, beautiful women,

  • the color purple ... you name it.

  • But trypophobia isn't on the list. It's not yet officially recognized as a legitimate

  • phobia, despite the fact that an estimated 15 percent of people feel it to some degree.

  • The term itself popped up in the mid-2000s when internet users randomly began posting

  • images of hole-y things and comparing their aversions to clusters of small holes.

  • And then for close to a decade, typophobia seemed to just be some weird viral internet

  • thing, but recently psychologists Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins at the University of Essex

  • in England, decided to research its validity.

  • After comparing a variety of benign images with pictures of all sorts of things that

  • grossed people out, they found that the most offending images shared a common underlying

  • mathematical structure. Namely, they featured lots of small, highly-contrasting details,

  • like stripes, dots, or holes, that were spaced apart in fairly close, regular patterns.

  • For example, in this lotus pod, there's a high contrast between the dark holes and the

  • light surface, and the holes are spaced evenly enough to highlight those details, while creating

  • a repeating sequence that, apparently, makes some people want to puke.

  • Wilkins and Cole maintain these patterns are similar to those found in certain venomous

  • animals like the blue-ringed octopus, and various spiders and snakes.

  • They speculate such images trigger something in the non-conscious brain that lights up

  • a reflexive warning, saying "Hey! Hey! Hey! That's dangerous!" before the conscious brain

  • can step in and say, "Dude, that's just Swiss cheese."

  • If Wilkins and Cole are right, it would suggest that trypophobia is a lingering remnant of

  • some earlier, useful evolutionary adaptation -- namely, stay away from venomous things.

  • Another theory is that holes in organic objects subconsciously trigger thoughts of contagious

  • diseases or skin illnesses like rashes and boils, lesions, and pox -- things that are

  • dangerous to our health. So perhaps the fear of holes is a lingering evolved trait that

  • once helped us avoid disease.

  • What I find most interesting though, is that trypophobia may also be a so-called emotional

  • contagion, essentially meaning that it can transfer to more people as they become familiar

  • with it. Like, maybe if an hour ago I asked you if you were skeezed out by little holes,

  • you would have been like, "What are you talking about?".... but now, after hearing about it

  • and seeing some of these pictures, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

  • In which case, sorry.

  • But still, there are some people for whom all you have to do is say, "Hey, look at these

  • little holes" and then they totally puke all over you. For those types, the revulsion is

  • clearly pre-existing.

  • For now, the true nature of trypophobia is a matter of speculation, but still, I'll bet

  • some of you viewers just lost your appetite.

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Can I ask you a personal question? How do you feel about clusters of small holes?

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