Trypophobia

How does this make you feel? When Alex saw this image he immediately felt a mild revulsion, and went on to tell me that it would be just the sort of image that would trigger an attack of trypophobia - a fear of holes. I took the photograph because I found the mathematical arrangement of the pores in the underside of this tinder bracket fungus fascinating, and as I hadn't heard of trypophobia, I decided to do a little research.

In the early 2000s many Internet users bonded over their common aversion to pictures that showed clustered arrays of small holes, such as a beehive or even the popped bubbles on the uncooked top of a pancake. For almost a decade “trypophobia,” literally “fear of holes,” was nothing more than an Internet phenomenon, but finally researchers have found evidence of its validity and investigated its possible cause.

Four years ago two psychologists at the University of Essex in England, Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins, decided to research the phenomenon. They showed a picture of a lotus seed head—anecdotally a potent trigger of the phobia—to 286 adults aged 18 to 55 years old. Eleven percent of men and 18 percent of women described the seed head as “uncomfortable or even repulsive to look at,” indicating a level of revulsion on par with phobia.

Cole and Wilkins theorized that the visual structure of the image causes at least part of the unease. They analyzed a set of aversion-inducing photographs and images of holes that did not trigger trypophobia and found that most of the disagreeable pictures shared an underlying mathematical structure that incorporates small, high-contrast features such as dots or stripes. This spectral pattern is seen in the skin coloration of many species of dangerous or poisonous animals; past studies have found that most people find this pattern uncomfortable to look at. Indeed, a variety of images taken from the Web site trypophobia.com produced discomfort in a group of 20 people who did not have the full-blown phobia.

These spatial characteristics explain at least some of the discomfort caused by pictures of small holes, but Wilkins acknowledges that something more is needed to explain the intensity of revulsion in sensitive people. The crucial factor might be an association with skin lesions such as scars or sores—those with trypophobia often say that the sight of clustered holes makes their skin crawl, and pictures of holes in skin are particularly potent. The emerging story, then, is that “fear of holes” may be a form of the universal aversion to scars and sores—an evolved trait that may have helped our ancestors avoid germs and disease—extended to objects such as lotus seed pods and honeycombs.