 Okay where does fear come from? Fears can be acquired evolutionary there's some fears that this your affective nervous systems come into the world with some things built in because the ancestors you had that survived survived because they avoided certain things and my story of this is at a pet rat herbie in Portland Oregon and herbie was a I raised him from four day old so he never saw anybody else and he the collected as they used to call it but he bonded with me because I was his only parent for a long time so he wasn't afraid of me we would you know I didn't have to put him in a cage you lived in the apartment with me and you know it was normal and then one day the neighbor got a got a little kitty cat little teeny kitty and I thought oh wow the kitty was barely got its eyes open really tiny little thing and I thought ah herbie and herbie went everywhere with me and everything and I thought herbie should see the kid cat so we go over to meet the kitty cat and herb goes into a full extensur rigidity total overwhelmed with fear which completely shot me because he never seen a cat before in his entire life anything like this so that was built in pretty deep in herbie and herbie was in fact actually traumatized herbie never you know ran when we got home he ran directing his cage wouldn't have his cage for days so huge so some kids come in with hyper exaggerated fears some of them are just part of our DNA and most of them don't interfere much with schooling but some sometimes do but anyway they're they come in that way and others we acquire over ontogeny over development I used to get very sick with chocolate and when I was a very young child I don't even remember it but as a result my nervous system learned to fear chocolate so it's not part of something I think about and so chocolate disgusts me and it's always a surprise like the other people like you you're thinking how could that happen so I've never eaten chocolate and it's not like when you put a chocolate cake out for me and people always think wow must be such a disability that you look at you know you want to eat the chocolate cake and I say it you know for me it looks like a piece of you know dungy cardboard it's like why would you want to eat that is the way my nervous system it's like it looks awful so I never have this feeling I'm missing out on anything I just think you guys are weird wanting to eat things like that but that's been learned by my nervous system because I got really sick and the nervous system really learns that well and I'll show that slide I think I want to do these three together I had a I fly a lot I had a trauma trip I'm going to do this fast because I want to catch up but had a flight from hell where we were under what they pilot came on and said okay we're going to run into some violent turbulence and when you know you've all heard we're going to have a little turbulence we're gonna have some moderate chop or something you think okay this is not good when he said violent turbulence you can imagine we went oh this not a word we like to hear anyway so we hit violent turbulence and the airport closed we couldn't get down blah blah and then we were hit by lightning in the middle of the flight and it just this explosion and we all thought we were dying and it was unbelievable well the guy next to me we finally did get down after a traumatizing thing and he said to me we both had our feet up on the back of the seat of the one in front of us we're like a total still frozen with fear and he says you know this happened to me a few years ago it took me two years to get over it and I was and boy that has been true I am so traumatized by flying you know it just I'm mostly over it now but this was four years ago and so what's this all about that the that some of your fear stuff the stuff that's learned through the amygdala is really really well learned you don't forget it and it's very hard to unlearn it your nervous system is not designed to unlearn it it's designed to make that never happen again so it's really adaptive your ancestors that saw a lion charging at them and saw it you know your neighbor getting eaten by a lion it wants to remember that forever that's the the ones that survived remembered it forever with fear and you don't want to sort of forget it go oh now let's see now all the lion came it it was eating my friend and this is this is the reason that those ancestors don't have children okay and so you want your nervous system to be very fast so what you develop is this very low level what's called the short route by some people that your very old dumb nervous system really learns things that are very frightening and you also have ability to learn things later like chocolate and so on but these are very fast acting which is why when you're walking in a a trail and you if someone gives you an anticipatory set says oh it's a great trail there might be a rattlesnake in there I'm not sure so then it takes just a little little noise and your whole nervous system does this okay does a big jolt and gets your adrenaline going so your can do the things you need to do and and it's very hard to stop that from happening because it happens very quickly and let me bring this into the classroom this was a study done by a new person that cast when she was a doctoral student at Harvard and it's very powerful she was measuring stress physiologically on middle school kids and they'd come in and she would wire them all up and then she'd have them do some reading and the idea was that you would have them read under a couple of conditions and I'll get to that in a moment but her research was astonishing unexpectedly because what she was doing she was measuring everything and she was waiting to see whether under one condition their anxiety be less than the other but she didn't get any effects for reasons we'll talk about but she didn't get any effects and what she went back and looked at her data and what she found out was that the kids they would come into this room no no pressure there was no big you know testing or anything but they were going to read and that the kids came in in two different levels of stress all the kids she had identified to two kinds of kids kids with reading difficulties and kids typically achieving kids the kids with reading difficulties came in at a highly elevated stress level right from the beginning of their moments in the room before she had them read anything they already went into high stress so this is their stress level this is typical kids now what she doesn't know and is going to do the research on were they walking around all day in school like that were they like your ancestors walking in the jungle where there are lions are they walking around all day at a high stress level like she measured when she first measured it because she meant it was instantaneous when she put the stuff on they were already under high stress they hadn't read a thing so the possibility is that they are walking around all day like your ancestors in a jungle full alliance that is to say they're waiting for something bad to happen they are stressed and what we know is that that is very bad for learning doesn't help you learn and it's very bad it's caustic for your nervous system it's not good to be under chronic stress for your nervous system and so we may have to put a warning sign on schools that say like cigarette ads caution this could be deleterious to your health if you are a poor reader and you're in middle school it could be that you are entering a damaging situation it's certainly a psychologically damaging but what is likely is that it's physiologically damaging yeah she's measuring a physiologic heart rate skin conductance up pupils things like that so it's the low level it's we're measuring the real stress not the kids reporting of their stress physically we can see there that low part of the nervous system is just like you've just said there's a snake there it's firing it's going I'm under I'm under stress so they are chronically under stress well we don't know they're chronically under stress we know they're under stress and we ask them to read so that's a big thing to be worried about that some kids are in a very different stress environment than other kids I want to skip those because I want to get to the how do we manage because this will get to the UDL part how do we manage things like fear what do we do and I want to say that the one thing that doesn't work is to say to the kids don't be afraid has no effect whatsoever and the reason I didn't want to get too much into it the reason is this your thoughts about that this could be a dangerous place activate the amygdala negatively that is if you think it might be frightening it gets the amygdala already for frightening things to happen thoughts that are trying to turn it off are not so effective it's very hard to tell yourself don't be afraid it doesn't look like our nervous systems are designed to do that well okay so the idea of saying to a kid don't be afraid this is going to be different or you're going to like this subject even though you've had a history of failing all of your subjects that the nervous system is not prepared to learn that it's learned a very core thing about the situation that is fear inducing and it's very hard to fix it