User:Soap/thoughts on trypophobia

Trypophobia isnt a fear of holes .... trypophobes eat donuts with no discomfort .... rather, it's a fear of holes where they dont belong.

List of potential new images
These are images that may supplement those already listed in the archive of the talk page for trypophobia. I have found, at most, just one of these included in a professional study, and even that one I'm not sure of, because I can't access the study itself .... only a review of it that doesn't explicitly describe the image. Even so, this page may help me track down leads for more academic studies.


 * 1) bryozoans
 * Saw this in two unrelated places on the Intenret, so definitely is real. Bryozoans are animals,  but they look so alien that some trypophobes may perceive them as no more triggering than a fishnet.  One of the images shown in the 2013 study may be a bryozoan, but I cant access the original article that identifies it, and Google Images does not help. (It says its snow but I  think it may mean the img has been "snowed out".) So far, of all the items on this list, this is the only one that I might actually be able to use.
 * 1) oatmeal, rice-a-roni, and stovetop cooking in general
 * Unable to verify ... we have never done a study on trypophobia that involved cooking oatmeal on a stovetop, and we probably never will. In this case a picture would not quite capture the essence, since cooking oatmeal involves seeing holes rapidly appear from what had
 * 1) Penrose tiles and other aperiodic tiles
 * Possibly just me, and possibly not even related to trypophobia. This tiling may have been the one that I found so difficult to look at that it made me aware of all the others.  We have a more complete copy but the SVG does not render with the same colors when viewed directly.
 * Click here to see it a large size.
 * If this is related, it is part of the "fear of clusters" side of trypophobia, which seems lesser known than the fear of holes.   But I also would object to walking on the full-size Penrose floor tiles at Texas A&M, so this may be something else.
 * 1) knees after kneeling on frozen peas
 * saw on an outbrain-like site (top 10 images trypophobics cant look at!! etc), and also got passed around these aggregators as a generic image posted with entirely unrelated content. I suspect they were drawing in users whose reaction was something like "What is that?" or even "what happened to her?"
 * 1) the CBC logo
 * same caveat as penrose. I have never heard anyone else ever complaining about the CBC logo in this manner, only one person saying that it's ugly.
 * holes in ice
 * this one doesnt bother me but i wouldnt step on the holes
 * 1) the iPhone 11 Pro camera
 * I would never buy this phone. The version with three lenses is significantly more offputting than the version with two, but having seen the version with three, i think of it automatically when I see the others. It is quite profoundly ugly.
 * 1) Brown trout?
 * I'd be interested in seeing if anyone finds the brown trout offputting. I personally find them one of the most beautiful animals in the world, and even have a collection of fish pics.  So, for me, I think there need to be three-dimensional features, not just spots.

Other images

 * 1) Soap bubbles
 * Only putting this here because of my name. I would rank large connected soap bubbles (like when blowing bubbles with a wand) as a weak trigger, certainly not in the same category as the lotus or even the oatmeal.  Everyday soap bubbles are either single (and therefore intact spheres) or very small such that I dont notice that theyre corrupting each other's shapes.
 * 1) this flower:
 * File:Fascicularia_bicolor_(hozdiamant)_001.jpg


 * 1) [ https://aiweirdness.com/post/177091486527/this-ai-is-bad-at-drawing-but-will-try-anyways ] <--- quite severe, such that I couldnt even finish the page.
 * 2) Talk:Trypophobia/Archive_5


 * this fish  .... like a brown trout but the dark patches take up more of the fish's skin ... is this a trigger or no?

Idiosyncracies
i have never seen anyone else link Penrose tiles to trypophobia and it is possible that it is not trypophobia, even in the sense of a fear of clusters, but an unrelated fear without a name.

Comparison to arachnophobia
APA seems to define a phobia based on how it affects the person, not based on what it's a fear of. So essentially, anything can be a real phobia if it affects them badly enough to be on the same level as people who stay indoors at night because they're afraid of being adbucted by aliens if they go out at night.

Which is fine. It could well be that there are no adults in the world with trypophobia severe enough to affect their day to day life in that way. But that would also exclude well-established things such as arachnophobia, since most of us live in places where spiders arent just crawling around in everyone's yards, inside their cars, etc to such an extent that avoiding a spider would be an obstacle to daily life. So I'd say the argument over whether trypophobia is a real fear or not has its place but doesnt mean that people with trpophobia should be considered to be faking it because they read it on the Internet or suffering from delusional psychosis (the belief that one has a mental disorder that does not actually exist). At worst, it means that trypophobia is in the same category as the much better known arachnophobia.

On the other hand, phobias are generally irrational, and that someone with arachnophobia isn't only going to tense up when they see a spider crawling towards them, but when there might be a spider crawling up and around them. Even if it's in a bathroom that they've cleaned fifty times, or in deep woods in the middle of a snowy winter. I can see how that could be quite disabling.

But I would still use the term arachnophobia for someone with a lesser fear, such that they are afraid of spiders they encounter in happenstance situations such as in their car, lying down on a grassy hillside, etc, even if they live in an area where no venomous spiders exist and have no reason to be afraid even if they are bitten. This is distinct from the common human reaction of disgust, since some people simply don't like spiders and will kill every one they see but have no fear of them.

So I get that trypophobia probably doesnt rise to the level of a psychological disorder in the sense that it will lead to people missing work, avoiding ordinary situations, and so on, but I think it's a real fear in the sense that it seems to be common and can't be easily explained as a culture-bound phenomenon. Also, I still think I'm a mild trypophobe, since I've found things such as bryozoa that don't bother me but seem to bother other people. Thus there may be people who arent as carefree as I am.

Thirdly, perhaps one reason why trypophobia isnt generally a major life problem for its sufferers is that nobody actually loves those deathly-looking patterns of holes and clusters, so there's not as much of the problem in daily life to avoid. It's not like the top selling item on the menu at every burger restaurant is a cheese omelet that looks like this.

Exposure therapy
I would not recommend this, as bad images can pile up on one another and make what was previously pleasant seem sickly. But this is only my experience. On the other hand, since I seem less sensitive than I was a year ago, maybe exposure therapy works after all.

Relationships to other conditions
Trypophobia seems not to overlap with the superficially similar koumpounophobia. Though both involve fear of objects with holes, they are fears of different types: koumpounophobia is the fear of buttons and buttons only,  is largely a tactile fear, and can be triggered also by buttons without holes. Trypophobia by contrast has no single everyday iconic object that generates the fear; the fear is of the holes themselves. Also, another possible difference is that buttons are extremely regularly shaped, whereas trypophobic images often involve holes in unexpected places, places where they seemingly don't belong.

I believe that trypophobia is also unrelated to the fear of falling, as although they both involve holes, they involve holes of very different types. I happen to have both ... as a child, I had to turn off the volume on a certain video game where I often fell into a hole ... even as an adult (age 25 or so), I had the same problem playing a different video game where, due to a glitch, I sometimes fell through what looked like solid ground.

The article
None of what's on this page will go mainspace unless I can meet the normal standards we use, of course. The total sum of all of the research I have done so far is just maybe perhaps possibly hypothetically conditionally getting the bryozoan image on.

It seems I  rejected koumpounophobia for precisely this reason, even knowing that I had contributed to it myself. (I know I have at least 1 edit and perhaps more to the version that was deleted back in 2009, but they may have been insignificant.)