Am I scared of swarms?

January 17, 2007 6:00 PM

What do I call this feeling I have towards tons of really small things?

For as long as I could remember, I've gotten a weird feeling when I look at things that involve a concentration of little things all piled together. I don't feel scared about looking at these things, so I'm not sure if it's a fear. I just feel really disgusted in a skin-crawling way.

Examples of things that make me feel like this are:
- ants swarming on something like a piece of candy (although I feel fine when I see them marching along in a line)
- things moving under sand which will make the grains of sand move
- concentrating too hard on television snow

Out of everyone I've talked to, no one else gets the same feeling. Is it some type of phobia? Am I the only one who feels like this?

posted by nakedsushi to health (21 comments total)

Creepy-crawlies?
Heebee-jeebees?
posted by rintj at 6:10 PM on January 17, 2007

I don't know what to call it, but I get it too. You're not alone on this one.

Of course, we may both be crazy, but you're not alone.
posted by katemonster at 6:31 PM on January 17, 2007

If you actually feel crawling things on your skin, it's a symptom known as formication. Usually it's caused by drug withdrawl, but who knows?
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:40 PM on January 17, 2007

>If you actually feel crawling things on your skin, it's a symptom known as formication. Usually it's caused by drug withdrawl, but who knows?

I feel it in the way that my skin feels prickly and cold. No drug use, so I don't think that could be it.
posted by nakedsushi at 6:49 PM on January 17, 2007

Excellent question. I know just how you feel. I get the same feeling looking at telephone poles that have had countless flyers attached to them and ripped off and are bristling with staples.

I think it is some kind of deep brain response to rot or decay.
posted by macinchik at 6:49 PM on January 17, 2007

Maybe someone from Go Ask Alice will be able to give you a decent answer
posted by victorashul at 6:58 PM on January 17, 2007

Your reaction is horripliation. The If you're conscious and aware when this happens, then it's likely what rintj said.
posted by nj_subgenius at 7:11 PM on January 17, 2007

er, horripilation. sorry.
posted by nj_subgenius at 7:13 PM on January 17, 2007

This is common fear / disgust reaction. Fear Factor, Indiana Jones films, and Edgar Allen Poe stories (and even Shell Silverstein) use this emotional response to elicit feelings of dread. I consider this not a fear, but something different, like a dread. I have the feeling you describe when I see or imagine the same kinds of things -- writhing masses of small objects (bugs, worms, grubs, snakes, even), though I am not frightened intellectually by one or many of the above. I have a similar fear/dread reaction when I surf. I am not afraid of sharks, but sometimes when I am in the water, just at the moment a wave is building in front of me, I get a weird feeling. It's not terrifying, but somehow cold and well dreadful. The opacity of the water makes it worse, but I've experienced it even in very clear water (when a shark *in* a wave would be obvious).

Anyway, I think that this is common. It doesn't have a specific name AFAIK.
posted by zpousman at 8:00 PM on January 17, 2007

I don't like there to be so many small unruly things with their own free will near me. Maybe it's because the probability of even the most unlikely action goes up when there are enough individual creepies. Maybe it's silly to imagine one lone spider would JUMP FOR YOUR FACE, but if there are several gallons of them, boiling up out of a rotten stump, surely a few of them will think of it.

Ants in a line, fine. You can predict where they're headed.

So, if you are ever tempted, some fine warm spring day, to pick up a suspiciously butchershoppy looking square styrofoam tray you see littering the walk, don't. There's more writhing autonomy under that thing than you can handle.
posted by Sallyfur at 8:26 PM on January 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

I get the same feeling. It's kind of disturbing.
posted by flod logic at 9:20 PM on January 17, 2007

You know, classical Hebrew has an actual verb for this kind of creature: sharats which means "to creep, to swarm". And a bunch of swarming creatures are called shritsim. They are among the prohibited animals in the dietary laws of Leviticus 11.

In a very famous essay called "The Abominations of Leviticus", the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that the dietary laws, with their division between clean and unclean flesh, depended on a set of internal and implicit mental categories which included locomotion. Swarmers aren't kosher, she said, because they have too many legs and don't move in a straight line.

Sharats is the verb used in the plague story in Exodus to describe how the Nile seethes with frogs, which then burst out and swarm all over. So, I'm quite certain that there were more than a few biblical authors who had the same reaction you do to creepy-crawlies.
posted by felix betachat at 12:29 AM on January 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Anything wrong with "repulsion"? That's problably the emotion I'd reach for here. "Repugnance"?

(I recognise the feeling, but other things do it for me - for example, some species of frogs and toads embed their eggs into the skin of their backs. When the eggs have hatched, the animal's left with a whole bunch of scooped-out depressions on its back. That squicks me out every time.)
posted by Leon at 4:06 AM on January 18, 2007

Right, I was OK this morning until I read all this. Now I have to go firebomb my local slice of Nature.
posted by aramaic at 5:51 AM on January 18, 2007

I'd go with "revulsion," although of course that's not specific to tiny things.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:13 AM on January 18, 2007

Argh, I get this too! Everyone thinks it's weird but, like you, things like a pile of ants moving just make my stomach turn. I also get it for groups of any kinds of insects, like swarms of wasps around a hive, any surface that has multiple small bumps on it, and, although it embarrasses me to admit it, with large piles of some foods, like baked beans! (Although I can still eat them so I can't be that scared of them.) Unfortunately my lovely boyfriend thinks it's hilarious, so now to everyone I know, I'm known as 'the girl who's scared of baked beans'!
posted by schmoo at 9:13 AM on January 18, 2007

Yuk I just looked at Leon's link to the picture of the eggs on the toad's back - now that really made me feel sick!
posted by schmoo at 9:15 AM on January 18, 2007

Is there a term for the opposite effect?

I'm easily fascinated by chaotic swarms of things. I love to spend unusually long lengths of time focusing my attention on swarms of ants, bees, brownian motion, artificial life, etc. usually to the point where I start to lose track of time and what's going on elsewhere around me.

I love to watch how ants can cluster onto a food source and slowly disassemble and carry it away piece by piece. When I was very young, my grandmother used to put out sugar water for bees, and I could sit there and watch them for hours.
posted by joquarky at 9:27 AM on January 18, 2007

I call it the screaming meemies.
posted by Sara Anne at 9:52 AM on January 18, 2007

I kinda know what you mean, but large flocks of birds have the opposite affect on me. I could stare at them in a trance for hours.

But lift up a rock w/ creepie crawlies under - yuck.
posted by vronsky at 3:46 PM on January 18, 2007

schmoo - dare you to click the photo gallery link on that page.
posted by Leon at 1:14 PM on January 20, 2007