When something causes us fear, we tend to misjudge the distance at which it is located. In other words, if a spider scares us, our terrified brain makes us perceive it much closer than it really is , as published in Current Biology magazine in its latest issue.
The authors of the research, led by Matthew Longo, from the University of London (United Kingdom), developed an experiment in which a group of volunteers were asked to observe how a series of objects were approached on the screen and to press a button when they considered they were "about to crash." When the image belonged to a snake or a spider, the sense of proximity appeared much faster than if the approaching object was a rabbit or a butterfly. "If something instills fear in us, we perceive the possibility of a collision earlier," says Longo, who suspects that it is an adaptive mechanism, since "if an object is dangerous, it is better to react too early than too late."
