Why are some people afraid of riding a roller coaster, while others are not?

The fear brought by roller coaster is mainly composed of two working mechanisms of the brain, one is depth perception, and the other is crisis rapid response mechanism.

When people just learn to crawl in infancy, they can have a good sense of depth, and people's eyes can detect the distance of objects, thus instinctively avoiding excessive height. When we realize that we are at high altitude, the body's stress response has begun to play a role, and the biologically exciting substances in the body have begun to secrete, the running speed of the brain has begun to accelerate, and breathing has begun to be rapid. But this alone is enough to cause a strong panic. When the roller coaster descends rapidly, the panic will begin only after the crisis response mechanism is started.

You know, without eyes and touch, the brain won't know anything in a closed environment. In the process of rapid falling, we detected the feeling of weightlessness, and after comparing the brain with our feeling when falling, combined with visual images, it was easy to judge that we were in a crisis state of falling, so the panic began. In the process of panic, our survival instinct will be activated to prevent us from forgetting the survival action in a state of excessive tension. You will find that you can't help scratching at the guardrail on your seat, and even your knuckles will turn white.

The stress management system of the brain exists independently of the thinking system. It uses a simplified signal processing mechanism, which is much faster than the thinking system. When people don't realize the danger, the stress reaction has already started, so even if you know it's just a roller coaster and a game, you will still be afraid. When your nervous system disarms the alarm, the game will be over long ago. Fortunately, I can still see the people next to me.

If the roller coaster just descends slowly, it is actually similar to taking a sightseeing elevator. Because there is no sense of weightlessness, the stress response of the brain will not start, so people will not panic.

This fear of weightlessness can be overcome by training. For example, pilots often do these trainings. When the thinking system is used to weightlessness, it will record these data into the cerebral cortex and become a cache. When dealing with the crisis, it will directly call the ready-made data of the cerebral cortex to cancel the alarm, so that it will not be afraid again.