Fear can play tricks with your memory and your perception of reality. It also affects your body. Fear can weaken the creation of long-term memories and damage the hippocampus, short-circuiting the response paths and causing constant feelings of anxiety. Moreover, fear can interrupt processes in our brains that allow us to regulate emotions, read non-verbal cues, and other information presented to us, reflect before acting, and act ethically.
It’s the fear that lives within us that determines how our brain reacts to this fear. The less you know about a topic, the more you tend to rely on others to reinforce your opinion. If another person comes along and tells you the same thing, you will believe it to be true, simply be-cause someone else believes it. Then, as more people come to you with the same belief, you start to think they can’t all be wrong. This reinforces your opinion, and you begin to feel confident that you know everything that supports it.
As your passion for the topic increases, your fear of the unknown decreases. This encourages your brain to lower its activity to protect you, as it is no longer programmed to think of that fear as harmful to your body. As a result, you become more aggressive in confronting those fears. The more you confront those fears, the more emboldened you become. You gather strength in numbers and become more vocal and aggressive in your opinions, projecting them onto others.
Soon, your brain stops protecting you and becomes more aggressive in stopping anything that will change your mind. It becomes convinced that anything in opposition to your beliefs is like a virus attacking the body. It then takes on an attack mode to stop the virus from destroying you and sends a signal to you to get rid of those who attack you.
