It will attack and devour
anything. It is as if God
created the devil, and gave him
jaws.
Fear is an adaptation which is
good...
Certainly, you want to be afraid of
fast moving cars, and of heights,
and things like that. That's
what keeps us alive. However,
there are many cases in which we
have pathological fear.
Post-traumatic stress comes
after the trauma when the trauma
is no longer there. That's what
makes it pathologic. Having
stress and fear in response to
something that's happening
that's truly threat-inducing,
that's good. We certainly are
not interested in curing fear,
we're interested in alleviating
pathologic fear.
We have subjects come in, we wire them
up to a number of different
things in order to measure their
body and brain responses, and
then we provide these different
states, fear states in
particular. By placing them
into virtual environments, we
measure people's stress response,
we're analyzing the status of the
brain and the body through
measures like heart rate and
sweating, pupillometry, the size
of the pupils, which is a
readout of autonomic arousal or
the level of arousal or anxiety
inside the brain and body.
In a Society for Neuroscience
conference I saw a demo by one
of the VR vendors that triggered
a fear of fight actually, and I
tried it on, and it was very,
very effective. Then, that's
where I decided, "OK. This is
the way to put humans in a box,
and if we can just put some
sensors on them, too, we can
measure their reactions."
The first time I put on the
virtual reality goggles, which
allow you to look up and down
and behind you and actually see
different things, the
environment that I was
experiencing was actually a
virtual platform many, many
meters off the ground, and which
I was required to step off.
What I found was that my body
was actually resisting stepping
off the platform, and that when
I did, I got the physical
sensation of falling. In virtual
reality terms, I got presence,
which is my brain thought that I
was in the virtual environment.
At that moment, I realized that
virtual reality was going to be
an immensely powerful tool for
probing the relationship between
emotion and visual perception.
We took it upon ourselves to
learn something about the
technology, and then we decided
that we needed some scary
experiences, so we employed a
tree climber to climb very high
up into a tree that was swaying
in the wind.
What do you think? It's a nice
view up here. Want to go a
little higher?
We also have a stimulus in which
we worked with a professional
dog trainer to have a dog attack
you in the virtual environment.
Ah, ah, ouch. Don't
hurt me. Ah, ah, ah.
Then, that's one of the more
unusual and exciting ones was
diving with great white sharks.
Diving video narrator: Are you ready to go deeper?
It would be accurate to say that
we are crafting fear, so in that
sense we are craftsmen of fear.
Of course, we're doing more than
that, with the ultimate goal of
understanding how our bodies and
minds respond to fear, and what
are the parameters that change
when somebody has a mental
condition.
What I'm very interested in, and
what the lab is interested
in are purely mechanical acts
that you can perform, mainly in
the form of specific patterns of
breathing and specific patterns
of eye movements, non-meditative
practices. So that when we
place that subject back into a
virtual environment, where
typically or previously they had
a very heightened stress
response, they can maintain a
calm demeanor and make better
behavioral decisions.
We're still in the building
phase of this platform, but it's
really exciting to see a lot of
similarities between subjects as
well as very interesting
differences, so we're excited to
move forward and explore these
more.
The ultimate goal of this
project is to understand the
origins of anxiety. If we can
understand how anxiety and fear
are coupled to sensations, and
perhaps develop, ideally develop
new strategies for intervening
with our own states and anxiety,
and the conditions where we
don't want to feel anxious.
Because if we can do that, then
we really can shift away from
reactivity and suffering and
toward proactive coping.
Voice on the tree video: Hey! Come on up here!