MIT Finds Cure For Fear 523
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."
It must be in clinical testing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It must be in clinical testing... (Score:5, Funny)
Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know, I've never tried it, but my money is on a total freak-out.
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Bologna yourself!! I was climbing very high trees at the age of 3(Ceder tree w/ a low branch let me get started). This is from my mother. I had no fear of heights whatsoever. I distinctly remember being in that tree between the ages of 4-6 and getting chewed out by my mom and not understanding why she was so upset (imagine your young kid, 20-30 feet up in a tree..and no I am not exaggerating the height, I asked my mom and dad how high that tree was..the
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that some children fear heights. Neither of mine did, however.
That depends on the age of the children. Infants (6-18 months) will gleefully crawl off of heights not because they aren't afraid, but because their underdeveloped eyes and visual reasoning can't see the depth of the fall. After that, if you have a kid who dives off of heights you should feel proud, scared, and may want to consider gymnastics classes so they'll at least know how to fall correctly.
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Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some dangerous things are kind of nebulous. Electricty, heat, germs. It took mankind a good long while to trace illness to invisible bugs, so it doesn't suprise me that the concept of them being dangerous would be difficult to develop in the mind of a child.
But associating loud noises with a negative result is more tangible. I'd think that while it might not be entirely innate, it is probably learned early enough in life by a wide enough variety of people to be nearly inescapable.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:4, Funny)
And I'll be in Canada, high as a kite.
Re:Bzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Just similar? Say that next time your crush dumps you in front of the yearbook committee cameras!
In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely, now that he's got the chemical that causes fear identified, the only remaining part of his plan is to sneak down to the water reservoir with Cheney.
OR (Score:2)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
I was afraid something like that would happen...
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:4, Funny)
Not news...I found this years ago (Score:5, Funny)
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The alcohol doesn't remove your fear, it propagates your stupidity.
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Re:Not news...I found this years ago (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not news...I found this years ago (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not news...I found this years ago (Score:5, Funny)
Drink is the mind-killer.
Drink is the little-death that brings total obliteration to my little fear cells.
I will face my drink.
I will permit it to pass through me, but not over me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the drink has gone there will be nothing.
Only a yellow puddle will remain.
And thirst. Do not forget the thirst.
Did they use a polymorph? (Score:2)
How long until (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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This isn't an anti-fear drug. It's not even a drug. They just found that by genetically engineering mice to have more or less Cdk5 and determined its effects on their response to a floor which had caused them trauma after the trauma had passed. Mice with less Cdk5 got over their fear quickly, and mice with more Cdk5 were terrified to be in a similar situation.
For all we know, this is how propranolol actually works, though I can't dig u
uh oh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:uh oh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Terrorists, OTOH, I have no idea. I would imagine the smaller side of any asymmetric war would benefit from fearlessness. Suicide bombers? Definitely. But not all terrorists are suicide bombers -- so would fearlessness benefit, or harm, a terrorist who plants bombs covertly? I'd guess it would limit their effectiveness, since they'd be more likely to take inapproprate risks.
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Re:uh oh... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is, very few people in the Islamic world are polygamous anymore. Maybe a few rich Afghans, Sudanese, or Saudis, but they represent a tiny fraction of all Muslims. Polygamy has vanished in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, Iran, Indonesia...
As with most religions, Islamic practice has little to do nowadays with its historical theology. Western writers who only know a little bit about the latter and nothing about the former just make themselves look like idiots.
This is about PTSD fear, not combat fear. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:uh oh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uh oh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Likewise, I'm sure fear has plenty of levels of usefulness. As anyone with migraines or anxi
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Take swallowing a live hamster, for instance; your intelligence should be good enough to prevent that, even if you're not afraid. But if you weren't irrationally afraid of ro
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There was this guy I used to go climbing with who slipped once while doing some trad climbing and has been afraid of heights ever since. Mind you, he did not fall down or even get injured. All he did was take a look down at the ravine below him and freaked out. Ever since, he's stopped climbing and is deathly scared of heights.
People are scared of some pret
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Nothing to Fear [aol.com]
Jeffrey Combs as the voice of the Scarecrow.
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Isn't that obvious? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_Factor [wikipedia.org]
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So how long did the mice survive? (Score:4, Funny)
Conspiracy theorists believe the funding was provided by a group of cats ...
This is scary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is scary (Score:4, Funny)
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Data: Captain, I believe I am feeling... anxiety. It is an intriguing sensation. A most distracting...
Picard: Data, I'm sure it's a fascinating experience, but perhaps you should deactivate your emotion chip for now.
Data: Good idea, sir.
[beep]
Data: Done.
Picard: Data, there are times that I envy you.
Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
bad? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:bad? (Score:5, Funny)
This Fills Me With Fear. (Score:2)
It could be messy.
Although, it occurs to me that soldiers without fear might die often. I mean, fear is not without its uses.
Now maybe a cure can be found for (Score:2, Funny)
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"uncertainty and doubt. I have no hope though that a cure will ever be found for stupid."
The fundies already have prior art on "curing uncertainty and doubt." You "just gotta believe!" As for curing "stupid" ... do you really think any government or religious group would allow that?
I... (Score:2)
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Am I the only one... (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Peril Sensitive Sunglasses... (Score:5, Funny)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Super Chromatic Perl Sunglasses (Score:3, Funny)
I want one of those "Perl Sensitive Sunglasses" that would be so darn cool.
Yeah! (Score:2)
In other news, species doomed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news, species doomed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fears aren't just life threatening events, it could be a solider is scared of heights but needs to repel down the side of a building. They could be walking through the jungle with an extreme case of arachniphobia and unable to keep aware because he's pre-occupied with not walking through a spider web.
If this did ever become a viable product, I would hope for the sake of humanity it would only target irrational fears (spiders, darkness.. etc).. to be without any fear whatsoever... would we even be human anymore?
Fearlessness is easy (Score:2)
What do you mean cure? Fear is not a sickness! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Crippling Fear is a sickness! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Wait... You got a typo (Score:3, Interesting)
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 be
Good idea? (Score:2)
I guess I can understand some rare and extreme cases where this could be used in positive ways. There are some people who are unable to function in their daily lives due to irrational fears. However, it seems like this sort of thing could be abused, and that disturbs me a bit. I hope people consider that fear, anxiety, and angst are appropriate responses to many situations. I don't know if it's a good idea to take these things lightly.
No thanks (Score:2)
Social Anxiety (Score:5, Insightful)
And the winners are... (Score:2)
The real winners will be the sports fans, of course, as athletics is taken to even higher levels,
Fear is important (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
It would be the end of courage (Score:3, Insightful)
In related news... (Score:2)
In related news, gangs of emboldened mice terrorize cats in Massachusetts neighborhoods. One cat, who preferred to remain anonymous, puts it in his own words, "So I was just standin' there, right, snappin' my fingers and hangin' out, OK? And these freaks in white gloves start beatin' me up! I was like, 'Hey it's cool dudes!' but they kept sayin' somethin' about 72 cheeses in Florida, or somethin'." Said cat is currently in "Groovy" condition in a nearby hospital.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Panic, Phobia. (Score:2)
"the extinction of fear learned in a particular context."
Fear learned in a particular context? That makes this actually useful: for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Panic Attacks, and Phobias.
Something that eliminated fear indiscriminately would clearly be problematic, since fear is a key part of our self-preservation instinct. I haven't RTFA, but from that sentence, it sounds like this could potentially be used more selectively, to cure debilitating fear that comes up in contexts where it is not helpf
How useful is fear, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How useful is fear, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "breakthrough" is about blocking fear not about replacing it with another mechanism.
On a related did you know that we live around half a second in the PAST? That is the delay of the mind. Our brain fakes the memories so we don't notice it practically, but there is a reason why subconscious or gut responses exist.
It's sorta like this (Score:3, Insightful)
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
RTFA! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You should read a book called Descartes' Error by neroscientist Antonio D'Amasio. The book is all about how we use emotions to facilitate reasoning and has several examples of patients with the "lack of rections" you describe all of whom are incapable of making even simple decisions like when their next appointment should be. They disappear down th
Useful in a very controlled context... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Cdk5 Inhibition != Fearless (Score:5, Informative)
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.
last I checked (Score:5, Funny)
Like posting without RTFA.
Tom
As a Shaman... (Score:4, Funny)
This drug has existed for centuries! (Score:3, Funny)
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It's win-win for you. First of all, the demonstration is over, and those that would demonstrate against you are no more.
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I disagree. There are lots of things I don't do not because I'm emotionally afraid of them, but because I recognize them as bad ideas. I don't drink a twelve pack a night because of the health problems and discomfort it would cause. That's not a fear response, it's a "that's stupid" response.
Unless one categorizes all desire to avoid negative consequences as fear - which I think is neither accurate in itself, nor the definition of
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If humans can be reduced to chemical reactions then there is no need for human rights "endowed by a creator".
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