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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.