“I DON’T LIKE …..”

“I don’t like spiders and snakes”, is how the song used to go.  Turns out that’s pretty much true for humans.   It’s innate, say researchers who tested babies’ anxiety when exposed to photos of multi-colored tarantulas, back-to-back with similarly colored flowers, and coiled snakes with similarly colored fish.Conversely, other potentially dangerous animals….bears and rhinos…don’t elicit the agitation that spiders and snakes do.The study published in “Frontiers in Psychology”  finds that fear of snakes and spiders is not something learned, but instinctive and an evolutionary advantage,  as humanity has lived among reptiles and arachnids for millennia-longer than among those animals who can stomp us.Glad to have a theory to explain why I don’t like spiders and snakes.