The first thing that comes through your mind when you see a white shark coming towards you is,
"Oh my goodness, that's a white shark.
It looks like in the movies."
They're long, but their girth is what's incredible.
The bodies of these animals are just enormous.
They're very aggressive and dangerous animals, but we could collect very close, within inches,
footage of these animals by getting in there with the virtual reality technology.
The idea is to create the most realistic fear exploration studies
and the only way to do that is to go into the field and experience real fear.
The Huberman Lab is basically a wide-range kingdom of neuroscience tools and techniques.
Everyone in the lab is interested in some basic and important question
about how the brain works, how it wires up during development, or how to make it better
in response to injury, disease, or experience.
The other question that we're working on is: how is fear represented in the brain?
We discovered recently a brain area that, when it’s active, converts the fear response
into a courage response.
People talk about 'fight or flight,' but that's really a misnomer.
Most animals, including humans, don't fight when they're afraid.
They either run or they freeze.
But we found a brain area that sits smack dab in the middle of the brain that,
when activated, encourages the animal to confront their fears behaviorally.
The Huberman Lab is using virtual reality to test some of the ideas and mechanisms
that we discovered in mice, in humans.
By combining visual stimulation through the VR with auditory stimulation and even tactile stimulation,
or what we call mixed reality, you can create brain and body sensations, if you will,
that are extremely realistic.
And from that standpoint, it's not just a tool; it's a power tool for neuroscience.
Not just the belief, but the sensation, the feeling, that they're in that real-world environment.
That real-world environment could be walking along the edge of a very tall building,
with fear of falling off, or the experience of swimming with great white sharks.
And at the same time, we're monitoring things like the size of their pupil of their eye,
which is a readout of how much stress or arousal they're undergoing at any moment.
We're recording their breathing. We're recording their body posture.
We want to create the most realistic fear neuroscience laboratory possible
and in order to do that, we have to go straight to the source and have the real experiences
to bring them to the lab.
We're out next to, not on but next to, Guadalupe Island, Mexico.
There's nothing else around.
The great white sharks come here each year to feed.
The waters here are loaded with tuna and mackerel and seals.
We plant anchor, then we lower cages each day.
One cage is for viewing the sharks that come in to the surface to feed,
and there's another cage that we lower by crane from the boat, which drops down to 30 feet.
I was measuring people's stress levels, and giving people tools to control their stress levels.
And the reason for this is to be able to compare those tools that we use in the field
with the tools that we're using in the laboratory.
We edit the footage and then bring it into the laboratory, where you or other subjects
can come in and get the experience of what it's like to swim with those animals.
You basically get the experience as real as it can get, except you're not in the actual water.
We want to change the way that mental disease, and fear-related mental diseases,
like chronic anxiety, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as depression
and other anxiety-related disorders, are diagnosed by incorporating objective, measurable things
like heart rate, like breathing, like pupil size, in addition to what people say.
And so, we imagine that the data are going to be immensely useful for diagnosing mental disease,
so that when people say that they're feeling better or that they're not feeling better,
we can start to attach some real physiological measures to those statements
and start to compare them.
I feel it's my obligation as a scientist and as a human being really, to develop new tools
for the treatment of these incredibly debilitating disorders.
It's also just an immensely interesting problem.
At a very basic level, I want to understand how the brain works,
and if I get to dive with some great white sharks too, well, that's pretty cool.
In another episode of Science In The Extremes,
a hurricane hunter goes straight to the eye of the storm.
Thanks for watching, and subscribe to the channel.