Fear Conditioning Quotes

When I was a kid, I used to love it when one of my friends would jump out from behind a door and try to scare me. I always did the same thing in response.

Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.

The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

Nearly every man is a coward, if confronted by the proper terror.

We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in.

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

As a child, I was a brat, and my parents didn't know how to control me. So they told me ghost stories, which stayed with me. I am still petrified of darkness and being alone.

There's something about the human brain, that it actually has a predilection towards negativity, which served us really well when we lived in an environment that was very threatening.

Stop being frightened. You only see a monster because they want you to see monsters everywhere. They've conditioned you to look for monsters in every shadow, every coat hung on every door. As long as we keep seeing monsters, we'll continue to need protection and that's how other people get to control our lives.

If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me.

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature... Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after-world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell.

Fear is a force that sharpens your senses. Being afraid is a state of paralysis in which you can't do anything.

Since the great foundation of fear is pain, the way to harden and fortify children against fear and danger is to accustom them to suffer pain.

Old habits are hard to forget, and old fears are habits.

There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think we can start with the psychological explanations. Even psychological states like fear or desire for safety are conditioned by social and political forms of intimidation and scare-mongering that intensify those emotions, and even work to persuade people that nothing less than their survival is at stake.

The fear of public speaking is a primal fear. You can train your body to not be crazy when you're doing it, but it truly is a primal fear.

We are all born cowards.

The only thing we are naturally afraid of is pain, or loss of pleasure. And because these are not annexed to any shape, colour, or size of visible objects, we are frighted of none of them, till either we have felt pain from them, or have notions put into us that they will do us harm.

After a while, the fear became a habit, too.

When the lab rats hear the bell ringing, they freeze. That's what fear does to you - fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life... Darkness has a way of scaring us.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.

Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric.

Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?