Transcriber: egemen soylu Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Fear feels awful, but it's a very useful emotion
as it helps us to avoid dangerous situations.
However, fear of an object or situation can also be groundless or exaggerated.
Then it's called phobia. Phobias are very common, in particular, fear of spiders,
fear of heights and fear of public speaking,
especially fear of giving TED talks. But let's be serious.
Phobias can be very burdensome and interfere with your personal
and professional goals. So where do phobias come from
and why does memory play your own? Take somebody with fear of public speaking.
He or she may have had a very embarrassing experience in the past.
Well, and a very strong fear memory has been formed when today.
This fear memory gets activated and triggers to fear response.
Now somebody with a fear of spiders may not be able to recall
a bad experience with a spider. So where did the fear come from?
Either from an experience in early childhood when it was too early to form
conscious memories or this fear memory is innate.
In both cases, memory is central to phobia.
So if that's the case, few should be reduced if you block this memory.
But how can you block memory?
Twenty years ago, our research group discovered that
the stress hormone cortisol has exactly this effect in stressful exams.
It is the reason why you may have problems to recall what you have learned.
So in phobias we tested if this hormone can reduce fear symptoms by reducing
fear memories. And it did in spider phobia and social phobia
and in fear of heights, we are now working on possible treatment protocols.
But it's too early for clinical use.
But there's another way to silence the fear memory you build up
an even stronger memory of safety,
and that's what's done in exposure therapy,
where the patient is gradually exposed to the feared object
or situation in real life and learns that it's not dangerous.
After successful therapy, this memory of safety becomes stronger than
the original fear memory and the phobic response is reduced or even absent.
Even though conventional exposure therapy is highly effective,
there are two problems. First,
it's not offered by many therapists because they would have to get
the spider a snake or take their patients to a tower.
Second, most patients had to be exposed to a real feared object or situation.
So the solution could be to do it yourself with an unreal object
or situation. And that's what we do in our lab with the development of virtual
and augmented reality apps for smartphones.
And DVR app to reduce fear of heights,
you start by standing on a platform at ground level,
important you only go higher when your fear is low.
Like this, you go higher and higher without ever experiencing high levels of
fear. If you do the app repeatedly,
you can reach up to 70 meters above the ground.
But does this help in real life?
We tested that on a watchout tower in a clinical study.
As compared to the control group,
subjects who used the app over a two week period at home showed
a significant reduction in fear,
the app was in fact equally effective as conventional therapy.
We also developed an augmented reality app to reduce fear of spiders.
In this app, a virtual spider is added to the real world
and you have to do several tasks as, for example,
holding your phone tightly because the spider will jump on it.
This is obviously an advanced level.
If you use the app repeatedly, the reward is that at the end,
you will actually start to like the spider and you will see
the spider will like you too.
If you suffer from a phobia, your enemy is your fear memory,
with the advances in research and technology,
it's now easier than ever to build up a strong memory of safety,
which silences the fear memory and thereby brings relief. Thank you.