Trypophobia is an aversion to clusters of holes or cracks that’s associated with feelings of fear and disgust.

You might not have heard of it. But don’t worry: you won’t be able to forget it now.

© Cait McEniff for Mosaic

Psychologists recognise a number of phobias that can have a huge negative impact on people’s lives. The new kid on the block, trypophobia, is not yet widely accepted as one of them.

There is even debate about whether it is a phobia at all. That’s because while most phobias are synonymous with abject terror, a number seemingly provoke disgust as well as fear. Some researchers think that trypophobia is based only in disgust.

Asked what first triggered their trypophobia, people describe everything from a Christmas bauble to a picture of a wasps’ nest, pitted bricks in a wall, bubbles in cake batter, the way water beaded on their shoulder after a shower.

As well as such triggering objects in real life, many people with trypophobia describe images as being particularly problematic. Pictures involving lotus seed pods are often cited as initial triggers. If you haven’t seen one, the lotus plant produces large green seed heads that look almost like a shower head, with many large seeds. The “lotus boob” meme, a fake image and story about an infected breast, caused quite the stir when it started circulating on email back in 2003.

There is limited research into trypophobia, but one study might help explain why that meme (debunked by Snopes) spread so far and wide – it found that trypophobia is more powerful when holes are shown on skin than on non-animal objects like rocks. The disgust is greater when holes are superimposed on faces.

Of course, the lotus boob meme wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the internet. The world wide web has been linked to the rise of other conditions that have physical or behavioural symptoms but, many believe, have their origin in the mind – so-called psychogenic conditions.

From Strasbourg’s dancing plague of 1518 to the 2011 case of twitching teenage girls in a small town in New York state, mass psychogenic illnesses are nothing new. They’re part of the fabric of being human. But with the internet and its virtually instantaneous global avalanche of information, billions of us can be exposed to potential triggers wherever we are in the world. And anyone with a device and an internet connection is a potential agent of spread.

Online communities have emerged around things like Morgellons disease (an unexplained skin condition) and people who believe they are “targeted individuals”, being stalked, surveilled or experimented on by the establishment. So, is trypophobia another of these odd conditions? Is it a product of the digital world, or simply disseminated through it?

And why for the affected people are holes – of all things – the cause of utter terror?