Afraid of spiders? Of course you are - you've been brainwashed to fear them. That's (kind of) what researchers from the University of Queensland suggest.

Past research established that spiders catch our eye quickly, a trait called preferential attention. We know that spiders could be venomous, so we tend to spot them quickly and keep our eyes on them. A long-held theory claims that we fear spiders because our ancestors feared them. Good old Darwinism at work. Those that learned to avoid venomous spiders lived, and passed their genes and their fears on to their descendants.

That's not the case, asserts Dr. Helena Purkis of the Queensland Department of Psychology. We are simply exposed to lots of negative information about spiders. So while we keep our eye on those creepy looking spiders, our minds fill with all those bad and often untrue tidbits we've heard.

"Is that a brown recluse? Can't those kill you in like 10 seconds?"
"Spiders crawl in your mouth and lay eggs while you are sleeping."

That sort of thing. The result of this pairing - attention and negativity - is an emotional response that may lead to arachnophobia. In the same study, subjects that knew a lot about spiders, spider experts in fact, did not exhibit this emotional response.

So, by this logic, you can cure your arachnophobia simply be reading lots of positive, true information about spiders. Start right here with an article on the order Araneae, the spiders.