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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."
Because I saw some MIT guys talking to GIRLS!
President Bush introduced a bill this week to eliminate all research funding at MIT.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It is also called Liquid Courage. Drinking enough alcohol leaves me with no fear as well...
this finds its way into MREs given to soldiers?
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.
Conspiracy theorists believe the funding was provided by a group of cats ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
I am terrified at the implications of this!
I hope to see commercials advertising fear-curing pills within the next few years so I can rush to the pharmacy with a prescription. In fact I think we should charge ahead with this and eliminate fear everywhere by putting it in the water with the fluoride. I see no downside or risk!
How can it be known fear won't be suppressed in similar situations where necessary flight or fight reactions are necessary to survival? oh, and also I for one welcome our new fearless squeaky rodent overlords.
uncertainty and doubt. I have no hope though that a cure will ever be found for stupid.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
...the Darwin Awards suddenly recieves a flood of new entries.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
People do crazy things when they are afraid. Turning a large protesting crowd into a terrified mob could potentially cause more casualties than it would prevent.
Fear is what keeps us from doing dangerous things. Fear is an important part of our survival system. Targeting contextual fears could be therapeutically useful, but I think "cure" is the wrong word. The ultimate word on fear, though, comes from Jack Handy:
Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, say you were an astronaut on the moon and you fear your partner had been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for moon pieces, WHAM!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, "Think again, Batman!"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Because it take no courage to do something you are not afraid of doing (or saying)...
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.
...for one welcome our new fearless rodent overlords!
My blog
And I share the concerns about the abuse of this potential drug.
But there are mental illnesses that deal with crippling fears, where extreme fear of seemingly insignificant things can prevent a person from interacting with society in a meaningful way. For those people, this drug could bring relief, and a chance for a normal life. But control is paramount, and I'd need to see a LOT of clinical trial and years in the open market before it gets into military use. Fear will keep you alive on a battle field, but crippling fear will get your unit killed. Not only that, but being in a war zone isn't 24x7 guns blazing and shells falling. It's minutes of near death experiences followed by minutes, hours, days, even weeks of no activity. Knowing that at any second an explosion could rip you to shreds, or small arms fire could light you up. That is the stress that kills, the constant fear tearing at the back of your mind. Some people have even described the start of an attack as a relief, as they no longer do they have to sit in anticipation of the attack. If this drug could help prevent soldier from locking up in high stress moments, and relieve the pressure from the tedium of war, then I could have a solid benefit for the military.
If on the other hand, it takes away their fear of bullets, reprisal, and other control mechanisms... then it is nothing we want to give to anyone with a gun.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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.
As I read this article, it isn't about making something fearless or preventing fear...it's more about increasing the rate at which a learned fear response decays in the absence of reinforcement. Essentially, the brain has built in mechanisms to "cure" fear on its own, given enough time without reinforcement of that particular fear. Inhibition of this enzyme--oddly enough one linked with plasticity and neural development--makes that process easier/faster.
If I understand correctly, then they are right in saying this would be potentially wonderful for treating cases of PTSD where the fear response does not significantly decrease even at points in time far removed from the initial trauma, but I don't think we have to worry about inhibition of this enzyme erasing people's ability to feel fear or leading to fear-based weapons systems. Those things are almost certainly possible (lesions on the amygdala are thought to tame animals by destroying their ability to feel fear), but I don't think they'll appear as a result of this study.
fear is good. It stops us from doing stupid things.
Like posting without RTFA.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Read the article. This is about extinguishing learned fear, such as post traumatic stress disorder. This is not a drug that controls fear in the present moment. It has absolutely nothing to do with either situation you mention.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The first post is more correct, as the drug might actually apply in a situation involving girls. The drug treats learned fear, not the innate fear of combat. It will be used to help control post traumatic stress disorder. Arguably, fear of women is a learned fear similar to PTSD.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...I just use my Tremor Totem. Easy :D
It just doesn't last very long, gives you a hangover the next morning, and makes ugly women look like supermodels.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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").
Good Lord! the font on my monitor is tiny, coupled with the word Chromatic, and I translated Peril -> Perl.
I want one of those "Perl Sensitive Sunglasses" that would be so darn cool.
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.
Fear is a useful mechanism in preventing humans from doing things that have potentially bad consequences for the person.
Fear is a useful mechanism in preventing humans from doing things that have potentially bad consequences for the powers that be.
But on a more serious not, fear does prevent humans from doing things they have no little understanding of which may lead to potentially have "good" consequences.
I mean what if Christopher Columbus has been too scared to travel to the new world?
What if NASA had been too scared of sending a man to the moon?
And more importantly what if you dad had been too scared to make a pass at your mom? (We'll you wouldn't be here today)
Fear does keep us from doing things doing stupid things that will get us killed, but often times we let it get out of control in which we don't do things that are not even remotely harmful because we are too scared of the consequences. This also means fear can be used as a tool by powerful persons or organizations to keep others in line without having to result to physical force.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Without Fear, what will lead to Anger? Hate? S-S-Suffering????
Giving this to the dudes in the foxholes would be pretty stupid, but there are military applications if a particular fear could be eliminated. A submarine crew who are freaking out because there is a torpedo in the water are less likely to do better than a crew which is unafraid because they have been conditioned to not fear torpedo attacks. Similarly a warship crew dealing with air attack (remember the Iranian airline shootdown). An airdefense battery crewed by calm soldiers shooting down missiles and aircraft has a better chance of survival than ones shitting their pants. An AWACS command crew dealing with incoming fighters can judge and react more rationally if they arent worrying about being blown out of the sky any minute. Most command and control and technical specialities (usually the entire navy) benefit from being cold blooded automatons.
The experiment demonstrated the ability to block a learned fear reaction where the subject experiences fear when exposed to circumstances in which unpleasant stimuli were previously present. This is not about inhibitting the fear reaction to currently present stimuli. So no super-soldiers or serial killers here, move along.
...can be found here:
m l
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/trauma-0715.ht
www.purevolume.com/martyd