Do brains feel less safe when exposed to thrillers, horror movies and crime shows?

I don’t feel anything like that, but I seem to have a thing for sad and thought-provoking situation. Sometimes it can haunt me for days. I think it isn’t how our brain is wired but how each person react to things.

Mine just seems to shut off when I plop down in front of a television to watch a couple of hours of mindless twaddle.

Yes – I think the amygdala is probably aroused to flight or fight mode. Since I am prone to be very reactive in any case, I rarely expose myself to such things.

It doesn’t bother me. It’s a box ten feet away. What’s it going to do to me?

I don’t know about “less safe” but there are certainly chemicals at work that sharpen (and sometimes skew) the senses whilst watching some things. E.G. Watch a movie entirely about spiders and tell me you don’t wipe your arm when a breeze comes by because you thought it was a spider.

In one part of our brain we are clear that it is “a box ten feet away”. In the other we hold some small reservation (even if just a modicum) that the box will climb off the entertainment center and attack us (exaggeration for effect of course).

Thanks, GAs all around! I’m fairly reactive too, I suppose. Never thought about that before.

Sure! I have a hard time sleeping after scary movies. Well, not so much now that I’m older, but yeah.

I prefer to limit the negative images stored in my brain. I never watch TV and I seldom watch video – never when it comes to horrific images, real or imagined. I have a tremendous amount of empathy and I normally get about as much of that as I can handle through still images, when it comes to bad, or evil.

What really freaks me out is kids gone bad. Like Broken Arrow or Columbine. Looking at the faces and reading what happened is enough. I’ll look and look at the kids faces. I guess trying to find some clue there, even if that’s impossible.