Can you cope with Fear?
Last night I watched Julianne Moore star in 2013's remake of Stephen King's Carrie. This is a film that didn't need refresh but Kimberly Peirce did a masterful job of bringing the menstrual masterpiece up to date.
Horror is such a weird genre when you think about it. Why do we want to scare themselves? Is it because we're bored? Or we miss the days when we were chased by tigers? Or is it because we get addicted to the rush as our amygdala pumps adrenaline through our nervous system as we sit on the couch?
Fear is this week's subject of mine and Alastair Cole's Innovation Ramble.
Fear is an intense emotion, and one that we simultaneously love and hate. As a species we’re hard-wired to be drawn towards fear. This intense emotion is older than we are as a species, and is tied to our survival; without it, we would have perished and died out long ago.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the movie Jaws – arguably the most iconic scary movie of all time. It was so powerful due to director Spielberg’s economical use of the actual shark on screen (as well as John Williams’ iconic, haunting score) because fear of the unknown is, understandably, the greatest fear of our species.
And as we step forward into the unknown, we have divided this episode into three sections:
- Coping with fear
- Creating fear
- The changing face of fear
1. Coping
Today we have FOMO. We also have Macrophobia, the fear of long waits (who doesn’t hate buffering?), Oikophobia, the fear of household appliances and Neophobia the fear of new things. If these interest you and you want some polite dinner party waffle then head to ThePhobiaList.com where you can find unending amounts of useless trivia.
Despite our joking around, phobia’s are scary sh*t (see what I did there?) with 40% of people have a fear of flying. But! There’s an app for that… when the ban on using mobiles during takeoff and landing was lifted ANA saw an opportunity. They built an app ap called Take Off Mode which has a series of games for you to play as you approach take off. The games have soothing music and the game-play responds to your emotions and when you take off the phone registers this and the game adapts.
A smartphone app called Aspire News is designed to help in domestic violence situations by sending an alert to your contacts. It’s from the When Georgia Smiled: Robin McGraw Foundation and powered by Yahoo!. This free application is designed to look like a news app that contains the latest news stories in the world, sports and entertainment news. There’s a catch, though: the help section is geared towards helping victims of domestic violence.The app lets you add trusted contacts. When you triple tap on the toolbar a message will be sent those contacts all while looking like you are on a news app.
Virtual Reality offers powerful and affordable therapeutic applications that could change a lot of lives. Two engineering students at Santa Clara University in California developed a VR application to help therapists treat people with phobias. Virtual environment simulates walking around on building roofs and other precarious places to help people who are afraid of heights. Source.
2. Creating Fear
Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) has great promise since it historically produces a “cure” about 90% of the time at about half the cost of traditional cognitive behavior therapy and is especially promising as a treatment for PTSD where there are simply not enough psychologists and psychiatrists to treat all the veterans with anxiety disorders diagnosed as related to their military service.
Virtual technology constructs a personalized environment based on what a patient remembers, adding specific sounds or visuals from the patient’s memory for realistic effect. For patients afraid of flying, that might be the sound of an airplane engine; for victims of sexual assault, it might be watching a man approach in an empty bus station.
The more patients interact with the virtual environment, the more they typically are able to recall, until the scene becomes familiar. Healing begins when eventually the familiarity of the scene suppresses fear neurons in the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes fear and emotion—and new information about the event is learned, researchers say.
VRMC currently uses virtual reality exposure therapy (3-dimensional computer simulation) in combination with physiological monitoring and feedback to treat panic and anxiety disorders. These conditions include specific phobias such as fear of flying, fear of driving, fear of heights, fear of public speaking, fear of thunderstorms, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, arachnophobia, social phobia, panic disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder due to motor vehicle accidents. General stress management and relaxation skills are taught for stress-related disorders.
Virtual reality exposure therapy places the client in a computer-generated world where they “experience” the various stimuli related to their phobia. The client wears a head-mounted display with small TV monitors and stereo earphones to receive both visual and auditory cues.
After an intake session and skill building sessions to teach the patient how to control automatic responses to anxiety-provoking situations, the therapist and client collaborate to create a hierarchy of anxiety-inducing situations. In careful, controlled stages, the client is exposed to these virtual experiences that elicit increasingly higher levels of anxiety. Each stage can be repeated until the client is comfortable with the experience and satisfied with their response. At every step, the therapist can see and hear what the client is experiencing in the virtual world. If the level of anxiety becomes overwhelming, the client can return to a less stressful level of treatment, or simply remove the head-mounted display and exit the virtual world.
Resident Evil publisher Capcom has created what could be the scariest game ever. Kitchen is a VR game on Project Morpheus that was demoed at E3 2015, includes elements of recent horror movies Saw and Ring, and delivers unprecedented levels of sensory immersion. Which is great if you’re mad for horror games, but could be dangerous to human life if you’re not… during a Q&A session at Unite 2014 in Seattle, creative director for Cloudhead Games, Denny Unger, was reported by Game Industry as saying that death-by-horror-games on Oculus Rift “were inevitable.”
Good VR creates an experience. It makes you feel like you’re participating instead of spectating. Horror in VR is intense because it’s so immersive — it simply feels more real when zombies, monsters, and ghouls get really close to your face. And 3D positional audio has the capacity to put the footsteps and screams of the damned into every dark corner. Generally speaking, a VR version of horror will always be scarier than the non-VR version.
For people who just aren’t satisfied with the run-of-the-mill terrifying movies or the everyday shaking-in-your boots novels, you can embark on the Ultimate Fear Experience. For $4K a newly formed business in New York will arrange to have you abducted, tied up, gagged, and kept confined for hours or days to instill as much fear in you as possible. The specific twists and turns of your own kidnapping can be customized depending on your own preferences and idiosyncrasies for personal terror. Scary stuff!
We hope you enjoy the podcast on fear but you must listen to the pros do it properly. Check out the Fearless episode of NPR’s Invisibilia. This podcast covers the hyper-rare Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes abnormalities in a part of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is a key component to how we respond to fear. It normally sends signals to other parts of the body when it senses danger, causing reactions like sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat.
A U.S. woman only known as S.M. has a rare genetic condition that keeps her absent of fear, even in life’s most terrifying situations. “If she would be threatened — and she has in her life — she would not register the fear that that would immediately cause in you or me,” Antonio Damasio, Indeed, she’s been held at gunpoint and knifepoint, beaten by her husband, and inches away from a poisonous snake, but nothing seems to faze the Iowa woman.
It’s because the 44-year-old mother of three has Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes calcium deposits to build in her brain’s amygdala. Doctors have been studying her for more than 30 years. There are 400 people on earth with no fear.
It’s not just human’s that feel the fear, other animals get jumpy too. Scientists observed how animals spread fear amongst large groups very quickly. The reason for this is that animals give out alarm pheromones when they feel fear. This pheromone is spread exponentially as each animal in the group responds to it and in turn emits it. This wasn’t thought to exist in humans until scientists took pheromones from people jumping out of aeroplanes (I’m not sure how). These pheromones were then wafted in the faces of people in MRI scanners. Patients who were subjected to the human fear pheromone had a heightened capacity to sense danger.
3. Changing Face of Fear
Truth is we’ve never had it so good… The kinds of violence to which most people today are vulnerable – homicide, rape, battering, child abuse – have been in steady decline in most of the world. Sure, world conflicts have been on the rise for 70 years but there has been a steep reduction in the number of armed conflicts of all kinds since the end of cold war in the early-1990s.
Most industrialized countries have also seen their homicide rates fall in the past decade. Among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in the past 15 years. Over the same period violence against children is down, as are genocide and other mass killings of civilians. Autocracy is giving way to democracy and wars between states – by far the most destructive of all conflicts – are all but obsolete.
We’re living in a much safer world than our forefathers. Which means we’ve been looking to get our danger fixes elsewhere.
However, in the world of business it is often overlooked that the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures. Academics suggest that there are major barriers were cultural/attitudes. “Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States.
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