Is Trypophobia a Real Phobia?

If you're like me and you have a visceral reaction to the image above—if it makes your skin crawl, your hair hurt, and your stomach turn—you can count yourself among the trypophobic. According to its Facebook page, which is more than 4,000 members strong, trypophobia is fear of clustered holes. It is usually small holes in organic objects, such as lotus seed heads or bubbles in batter, that give trypophobics the extreme willies, triggering reactions like itchy skin, nausea and a general feeling of discomfort. (A picture of a candy bar with a pattern of small air bubbles did me in. Goodbye, dear chocolate. For now.)

It turns out that I'm not alone. I contacted roughly 10 psychologists for this story, and of those who got back to me, none had heard of it. The evolutionary psychologists I emailed were unwilling to speculate on the potential biological underpinnings for a fear of small, clustered holes. Trypophobia is not an official phobia recognized in scientific literature. For many (though perhaps not all) who have it, it's probably not even a real phobia, which the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders says must interfere "significantly with the person's normal routine." Having just looked at a bunch of holey pictures and videos, I'm severely grossed out, but I can still write this story.

Read More at https://www.popsci.com/trypophobia