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MIT Finds Cure For Fear
Doom con runs away writes "MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience. They did this by inhibiting a kinase, an enzyme that change proteins, called Cdk5, which facilitates the extinction of fear learned in a particular context."
Why would you want to cure fear? Fear keeps me from giving in to a friend's bet and swallowing a live hamster. But seriously, unless you could target certain fears to help people with crippling phobias, this seems dangerous.
Interesting study. If the research can be generalied from context-specific fear, to general fear, it may the starting point for fear gas (described by Alastair Reynolds), which might be a useful non-lethal crowd control weapon
In all seriousness, what's the half life of this compound in the mice? I realize this is a long way from human use, but this seems like a damned foolish invention. You might think, for example, that you want soldiers without fear, but I would argue that a fearless soldier is soon a dead soldier. And I think even in everyday life this would be a dangerous state. Fear is a very primitive emotion and all creatures (well, certainly all mammals) seem to have it in varying degrees. In so many places it has a clear survival function. I'm not sure I'm keen to see a population messing about with such fundamental emotions.
Fear is a useful mechanism in preventing humans from doing things that have potentially bad consequences for the person.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Aside from treatments for shell-shocked war vets, I wonder if this could be used to treat more mundane fears as well such as phobias and social anxiety. That could be a boon to many, many people; social anxiety may sound wussy, but it is a misery-inducing and debilitating condition.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Because it take no courage to do something you are not afraid of doing (or saying)...
Army approved! Probably been in use in the field since the Iraq War started (soldiers get injections and aren't told what they are)--Go Army!
Everyone seems to be hopping on the "but fear is useful!" bandwagon - but I'm not sure it is. Fear, the emotion, is an instinctive reaction to danger, whether that danger is real or simply perceived. I don't see that it's necessarily bad to replace the gut response with a rational response.
That is, I doubt the drug will remove awareness of danger, simply the emotional reaction to it. While supersoldiers leap to every SF fan's mind, imagine what this could do for everyone who's got any kind of irrational fear. Fear of flying, fear of public speaking, fear of talking to girls, the whole list of phobias. Even in situations where fear is justified - wartime combatants, for example - I don't know that fear is helpful in comparison to the ability to rationally assess threats.
Regardless, in society at large most people most of the time aren't afraid of real threats, they're afraid of imagined (or at least, disproportionately perceived) threats.
Besides which, even the real threats faced by a significant percentage of people in modern industrialized society strike me as predominantly not susceptible to the "fight, flight, or freeze" response.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I see from all the comments that nobody actually read the article.
The 'cure' doesn't eliminate any and all fear. It doesn't address situational fear at all.
What it 'cures' is LEARNED fear responses. It's specific application to, for example, soldiers would be
for PTSD.
And even if there was a way to get read of all fear reactions, you'd still have a BRAIN and the ability
to choose not to do things that you reason are too risky.
Seriously, read the article. It's interesting.
Sheesh.
Fear is actually a very powerful disabler when it gets out of control. Many phobias and behaviors exist because an irrational fear has been instilled in a person of some situation or thing. Removing that fear mechanism just long enough to allow the person to act against their otherwise disabling fear would probably allow for significant recovery for people who are disabled by those fears.
Note, of course, I'm talking about irrational fears. Irrational fears of normal situations occurring in phobias is one thing, "rational" fear responses is another thing entirely. You don't want to make super soldiers or even people who are completely unafraid of certain social situations. We know what we call people who tend to be unafraid of more rational things: children or criminally insane.
We don't want to have to child-proof ourselves or society if fearlessness gets out of control. When people are fearless, they also tend to be somewhat more aggressive and even in a soldier (especially in a soldier(?)) this is a really bad idea. You need to have a healthy respect for your enemy if you plan on coming home or even living long enough to attain an objective.
On the other hand, you may be able to innoculate your troops against the noise and confusion of battle by controlled exposure to those things while having fear removed. The idea would be to allow the soldier to experience the events without fear, and therefore see how proper execution of tactics at the right time allows them to actually win (and be alive at the end of it). Its been said that even the most elite troops in battle only fire 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time, they are head down trying to stay alive. Considering that the enemy is firing at the same rate (or less), the fact is that battles actually have fairly little shooting going on within a certain amount of time. A unit trained to be able to fire even 40% of the time could win battles by simply having enough suppressive fire to be able to maneuver and surround an enemy position. That is, assuming that the enemy is not also trained in the same manner.
Our fears are a useful evolutionary advantage, but as evolution is a slow process, sometimes our fears cover situations that we expected to deal with in our distant past. "Fearlessness" is a bad thing, but perhaps "tuning" our fears so that they cover realistic modern situations and at the same time, treating rogue phobias would be an excellent application of this idea.
I just hope that whatever it is that does this can't be stuck in some drug that could be sold on the street someday... that could spell real trouble. As with anything with powerful potential, its uncontrolled usage could spell disaster.
The joke is that he would not want fear eliminated in the general public, because then he wouldn't be able to get away with his bullshit.
My first knee-jerk response was that this would be combined with propranolol, the drug that suppresses traumatic memories which is intended to stop PTSD but could instead be abused to prevent guilt over atrocities.
My second thought was of how amazingly boneheaded of an idea administering an anti-fear drug would be in a war zone -- especially for US soldiers carrying an amazingly expensive array of military gear and having had expensive combat training. Soldiers need fear as a survival mechanism. Without it, they'd do amazingly stupid and suicidal things.
You'd use a drug like this if your army were cannon fodder with poor supplies and training. I could see a use for this for suicide bombers or *maybe* for overrunning positions defended by few soldiers, but that's it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What is "innate fear"? I would suggest that in fact, no such thing exists. Instead, virtually all fear is learned. Even the amorphous entity called "fear of the unknown" is simply a result of having spent time on Planet Earth and correctly learned that the unknown can kill you.
I make this claim based on my having raised two daughters. As infants and toddlers, they have no fear whatsoever: just endless simian curiosity. This is why parents have to child-proof the house, since no 18-month old yet has a fear of electrical outlets nor running ovens. These are things that a child must be taught to fear.
Similarly, now that they're teenagers, they have to be taught to fear things that are inherently unsafe -- in some ways, it's worse now than it was when they were toddlers. As an experienced adult, I know that hanging out at the mall with no purpose other than to be with your teenaged friends is an inherently dangerous idea ...
(In any group of teenagers, take the IQ of the smartest one and divide by the number of teenagers present, and you'll have a rough idea of the collective intelligence of the group; divide this number by five, and you get a rough idea of the collective judgement).
... but my daughters think of it as fun. Only experience will teach them differently, just as it taught me.
Similarly, one has to be taught to fear certain aspects of combat: if you've never been exposed to it, how would you have any reaction to it at all, other than as a concept? I don't actually fear combat, and at 42, I should have such a fear if it was innate. I have a learned fear of death and I associate combat with mortality, so I know conceptually that combat should be avoided if possible. However, I have no real fear of it except as a concept because I've never personally experienced it.
I suspect that once this drug hits the market, we're going to discover clinically what I just suggested: that almost all fear is learned, consequently this drug will be used (and abused) to remove fears ranging from shellshock (I refuse to water the concept down by calling it PTSD) to fear of pregnancy or STDs from unprotected sex.
What this drug will probably be useless for is chronic anxiety due to brain chemistry. I suffer from this to varying degrees myself and I'm entirely aware that it's irrational and beyond my conscious control no matter how hard I try and relax. Instead, I take a medication intended to correct my brain's chemical imbalance. This drug will likely be useless to me but will find its way to the black market in short order for those who want to take tests without being nervous or engage in dangerous behaviour, both of which are learned fears.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
While I don't claim to be some military genius, I do happen to be reserve sergeant. It means that, for better or worse, in case of a serious war I would very likely get some summary training and a bunch of young men to live to our deaths. Make what you will out of that.
And it scares me to think I'd get to lead some guys who take this kind of stuff. There's this saying, "never share a foxhole with someone braver than you are."
The folks who are all brave, and the stuff of heroic hero tales and propaganda, are the guys who in practice had a nervous breakdown and did something stupid. And not only got themselves killed, but often got half the platoon wiped out. You _don't_ actually want people to start acting _too_ brave.
You can see what happen when people start caring less and less about personal safety, because that's what combat fatigue does. The more it progresses, the lower their chances of survival become. Think the Red Baron breaking his own rules and flying too low over the trenches. A machinegun got 'im.
Fear isn't just the instant irrational response, but also a factor in that rational assessment of a situation. It's why you execute your orders or trust your officers even against your common sense. You know, or hope, that if you do your role to the letter, everyone has higher chances to survive than if you don't. So basically a big factor there is precisely the fear: fear of what happens if you don't do your job.
And it can be a very irrational thing. If you were to take the rational thought path there, it's more logical to just keep your head low or just bugger off completely. I mean, fear or no fear, it's not particularly logical to have a death wish. And what keeps you there might just be an irrational fear of the unknown that would happen if you don't follow those orders.
Heck, war itself is a very illogical thing. You're asking some people to risk their life, or worse, to risk getting crippled, _and_ to do a very social thing that most would rather not be doing: killing someone else. And you're asking them to do it for little or no rewards. To quote Hermann Goering: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" Not a fan of the guy, but he does have a point there: the "reward" that the average soldier can hope for is staying alive. And if you're to think logically there, it's a damn crappy reward for risking your life. You actually have more chances to achieve that by _not_ going to war.
What keeps people there? Essentially fear. And I don't just mean the fear that the corporal will have their head for breakfast, or fear of being court martialled, but a lot of it is also the "my peers would have an awfully bad opinion of me if I bugger off" kind of fear. I dare say that that's most of what drives the other half of Goering's famous quote. ("Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.") Essentially that propaganda isn't as much causing people to be fearless and utterly patriotic, it causes groupthink and fear of the social consequences of trying to go against the stream. People don't as much think, "hell yeah, now I'm all psyched to go teach the French a lesson", people think "omg, the way everyone seems to believe that chest thumping stuff, I don't want to risk being the guy who comes forth and says that he's a coward." (Actually chances are everyone else thinks the same. That's the beauty of groupthink.)
So if you were to remove all fear -- including the "what would the folks at home think of me if I deserted?" kind of fear -- would people even stay in the army?
Mind you, it would probably be an improvement if people stopped shooting each other for the glory of some megalomaniac. But if your purpose were to get people to fight better, well, you might actually better off without this kind of thing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bologna. Children fear heights from a very early age. Depending on temperament, they also fear strangers, from a very early age. These are not learned fears. They are innate.
I have an innate fear of combat and confrontation. This is an innate response. I've been in one fight in my entire life, and I suffered no physical harm as a result. I have no learned aversion to fighting or confrontation. But put me in a situation where some big dude is threatening to hurt me and you will get an immediate flight or fight response. Put me in a combat arena where people are shooting at me and bombs are going off, damn straight I am going to be scared, not because my higher reasoning capacities have inferred that being in this environment could result in my death - but because millions of years of evolution have evolved a fight or flight response that tends to result in higher survival rates among those who don't ignore it.
Infants, placed on a high surface will not crawl onto a glass plate. Fear of heights is innate. Most infants react with fear to things that look like snakes. Fear of snakes is innate. There are plenty of others. However, I believe that your main point is that most fear is learned, and I believe that to be true.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You have evolved to fear bombs and guns over millions of years? Wow. I had no idea that they had existed for that long.
On the other hand, a 1-week-old baby that I held last weekend was perfectly comfortable. Yet I know that one two months older would have cried because I'm not its mother.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
What is "innate fear"? I would suggest that in fact, no such thing exists. Instead, virtually all fear is learned.
;-) Dogs have to learn about cats; cats don't have to learn about dogs because they have hard-wired reactions to things that smell "doggy".
To remove the emotion-laden human element, I'd mention that anyone who had kittens and puppies in their house will immediately think of examples of innate fear.
When kittens are first introduced to dogs of any sort, they almost always go instantly into a fear response. They arch their back, their back fur stand up, they hiss, and they attack the dog with their claws. They don't show this reaction to humans, or to much of anything else; it's a dog-specific instinctive response that happens at the first encounter with a dog.
Puppies, on the other hand, usually react to cats with curiosity, as they react to just about everything. When the cat attacks, puppies are surprised and don't quite know how to handle it. ("Why do they hate me?" comes to mind.
Humans do differ from most other mammals in having much weaker instincts, and depend on learning for most of their knowledge. This is part of what has made us the dominant creature on the planet. But it's silly to claim that humans don't have any innate responses. If that were true, we couldn't ever learn anything, because learning is a behavior, and some part of it must be innate. Computer people refer to this as a "bootstrap problem". You have to have some innate behavior, else you can't ever have any behavior.
Others have mentioned a number of innate human behaviors (other than learning about their environment), so I won't bother.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Bologna. Children fear heights from a very early age.
Yeah, they learn it by falling a lot. If it was truly innate, parents wouldn't need to buy all those plastic fences to keep their kids from falling over ledges and down stairs.
I have no learned aversion to fighting or confrontation.
You've never even witnessed a fight or confrontation, even on TV? Because that's all it takes to "learn" a fear. People aren't afraid of flying in airplanes because they've been in 17 plane crashes, but because they saw a couple on TV once.
damn straight I am going to be scared, not because my higher reasoning capacities have inferred that being in this environment could result in my death
Fear has nothing to do with "higher reasoning capacities".
Put me in a combat arena where people are shooting at me and bombs are going off, damn straight I am going to be scared, [...] because millions of years of evolution have evolved a fight or flight response that tends to result in higher survival rates among those who don't ignore it.
You have millions of years of evolution teaching you to be scared of the sound of gunfire? Uh, no, I bet the sound of gunfire and exploding bombs scares you because you've seen on TV what they can do. If you had no idea what a hand grenade was ("here, check out my new cell phone"), you probably wouldn't be afraid to hold one in your hand, or even pull the pin.