What is trypophobia? Why some people's skin crawls when they see tiny holes
Scientific American · Gabriela Galvin ·
Research suggests this aversion is driven by an instinct to avoid disease
Since childhood, clusters of circles have made me queasy—especially holes. Just thinking of honeycombs or lotus seed pods makes my stomach churn and skin crawl. My affliction has a name: trypophobia. By some estimates, trypophobia affects roughly one in six people. But its rise is sometimes put down to an online meme—an aversion to holes had a moment on the mid-2000s Internet. The condition is no joke, however: it can be debilitating, causing panic attacks and nausea—in extreme cases, people stop driving, miss work or avoid nature for fear of confronting upsetting stimuli.
Researchers first described trypophobia in a 2013 paper and argued that it may be a primitive fear response to venomous animals. Other, more recent theories include that it’s a disease-avoidance instinct that makes us recoil from anything resembling skin lesions or parasites, a form of cortical hyperexcitability where clusters of holes trigger a neural response—a visual equivalent to nails on a chalkboard—or simply a condition that caught on because it was a meme.
Now scientists may finally be closing in on an answer. Geoff Cole—the British scientist who originally pitched the evolutionary fear of venomous animals theory in 2013—recently looked back at the evidence and made a new conclusion. In a 2026 paper, Cole and his co-authors came down in favor of the disease-avoidance theory. Reviewing experiments that tested people’s reactions to triggering images, he concluded that trypophobia is primarily driven by disgust, not fear.
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