You’re flipping through images on Instagram. You stop dead at a lotus seed head. A wave of revulsion sweeps over you, and your stomach churns. You hurriedly click past, only to land on a strangely distorted honeycomb. You feel an overwhelming sense of disgust, dread, and impending doom. You suddenly feel chilled, and your mouth is dry. Your breathing and heart rate skyrocket. You sweat and tremble. You experience a sudden and uncontrollable urge to flee.
You slam shut your laptop and push it away.
If the above describes you, then you may join this author and the approximately one in six Americans who experience trypophobia, which is aversion, disgust, or feelings of discomfort when viewing clusters of small holes, bumps, or repetitive shapes.
But why? Trypophobia is not a fear response like a true phobia. It’s a disgust response and is entirely involuntary. How do scientists tell the physiologic difference between disgust and fear? Disgust causes a person’s pupils to narrow, while fear causes the person’s pupils to dilate. One theory is that trypophobia assists in avoiding dangerous animals, like the highly venomous blue-ringed octopus. Another theory is that our brains are hard-wired to avoid diseaseand that the brains of people with trypophobia simply cast too wide a net.
So what, I can hear you ask, does trypophobia have to do with patents? For one, an invention that can reduce undesired exposure to distressing images has value, and where there’s value, there’s a patent. Take Korean patent KR101916596B1 granted January 30, 2019, which addresses using a trained neural network to predict a ‘disgusting score’ of an image, presumably to allow a consumer or provider to either filter out or seek out disgusting content.
How about Chinese patent CN115299944Apublished September 10, 2024, that provides a mechanism to expose trypophobia images to a victim, err, patient, to trigger a trypophobic reaction. Or how about Chinese patent CN209807170Ufor a brassiere penetrated with holes. The holes are covered so as not to trigger a trypophobic response.
If you’ve made it this far, then the chances are that you do not have trypophobia. It is a bit titillating, though, isn’t it?
Happy Halloween!
— Robert Yarbrough, Esq.