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."

How long until

[Anarke_Incarnate]

this finds its way into MREs given to soldiers?

Re:uh oh...

[dotpavan]

yes, isnt fear supposed to be an in-built mechanism to prevent us from putting ourselves in dangerous situations (in which others have suffered bad consequences), just like comedy tells us that everything is OK with a false alarm like situation [bbc.co.uk] ["So what I'm arguing is, laughter is nature's false alarm. Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? So what you are doing with this rhythmic stocatto sound of laughter is informing your kin who share your genes, don't waste your precious resources rushing to this person's aid, it's a false alarm everything is OK. OK, so it's nature's OK signal."]

Re:uh oh...

[i_ate_god]

I don't think a lack of fear is going to make a terrorist more cocky when planting bombs. Removing fear doesn't necessarily remove logic. You have a mission, there are consequences personal or otherwise to the failure of that mission. Logically, those consequences are bad for the over all purpose of the mission. Getting rid of fear may cause you to knowingly inflict more personal damage (suicide bombers), but it won't make you forget that goals have to be achieved.

Crippling Fear is a sickness!

[RingDev]

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

Re:uh oh...

[erroneus]

I forget where I read it... it was probably linked from here anyway, but there was some discussion about why suicide bombers are muslim and all that. The bottom-line is polygamy. Polygamy lowers the odds of a young man hooking up and/or settling down with a woman. The odds are good that quite a few of these suicide bombers never had a chance with actually being with a woman in the near future or ever. Combine that with religious mythology and you've got a malleable mind. Promise "you will get laid in the afterlife" and you've got the conquering of fear from another angle...

but it also helps to be a moron who hasn't really thought things through. But then again, muslim culture suggests that women are not actually people but are property. What they think or even THAT they think at all is to be suppressed and ignored. Call me a feminist if you want, but I believe women actually ARE people and are capable of independent thought. And if you believe people have a spiritual component, it would have to be both men AND women that have spiritual components... just follow the logic trail to see where it ends.

Re:How useful is fear, really?

[A beautiful mind]

Gut response is fast. Thinking is slow. When you're dead to react rationally, it doesn't help much. Yeah, it might misfire 9 times out of 10. That one occasion saves your life when it is not a misfire.

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.

Re:uh oh...

[samkass]

I don't have a link, but Scientific American had an article a few years back about another use of laughter. Apparently, even when forced laughter allows the brain to hold two opposing concepts at the same time... the experiment used the "is it a vase or is it faces" and "old woman/young woman" pictures, and found that laughing people could see both simultaneously, but other almost always had to flip back and forth.

Likewise, I'm sure fear has plenty of levels of usefulness. As anyone with migraines or anxiety with panic disorder knows, the balance between seratonin, adrenalin, and other chemicals in your body don't just affect your mood. They affect sleep, digestion, learning, and even pain. Attacking fear with a sledgehammer-like approach is probably useful as a research tool, but would probably have insane side-effects if used as a medicine.

Re:What do you mean cure? Fear is not a sickness!

[SparkyFlooner]

On the flipside, it prevents you from doing things that could have potentially great consequences for a person. Such as mustering up the courage to ask someone out, or hop on an airplane without freaking out, or switching jobs and taknig a risk.

I'm not saying bottled courage is a good thing, but fear helps as much as hurts.

Re:RTFA!

[hawkfish]

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.

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 the rabbit hole of cost-benefit analysis and never finish because emotions are what cause us to assign values in such analyses.

So while this sounds cool, it will not have the effect you seem to be hoping for. Bur as you say, it may be of value for folks who have been deeply traumatised.

Re:Bad idea.

[Valdrax]

My third knee-jerk response is that I should've read the fine article.

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 up any articles to this effect.

Re:Wait... You got a typo

[vertinox]

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.

Re:Bzzt! Wrong.

[Hijacked Public]

Similarly, one has to be taught to fear certain aspects of combat

I'm not sure about that. When I was in Somalia (Marines) there were people who, on patrols, became nearly paralyzed with fear at the sound of distant gunfire without ever having seen the result themselves. And then there were people who, while we were taking direct fire and after having seen those beside them take hits, never raised their voice when they spoke to me.

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.

[DakotaSmith]

Children fear heights from a very early age.

Well, we get into a complex area, here -- one that this drug will no doubt make much clearer as it becomes clinically available.

I agree that some children fear heights. Neither of mine did, however.

Depending on temperament, they also fear strangers, from a very early age. These are not learned fears. They are innate.

Both of the fears you're talking about may have a lot to do with brain chemistry -- hence its effect being interpreted as a person's temperament and that varies from person to person.

As I say, this drug should have little impact on fears caused by brain chemistry. I still maintain, however, that the overwhelming majority of our modern fears are learned rather than innate. No doubt the clinical availability of this drug will help our understanding of which is which and why.

Re:Bad idea.

[Kattspya]

It could be useful during a prolonged artillery barrage but I'm not sure you need the actual fear in other situations. If you're doing something that is potentially harmful you don't need fear to be cautious. You don't have to be scared shitless to take cover when fired on.

Not necessarily a bad idea.

[SorryTomato]

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.

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.

Wow, hope for America?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cure for fear? Does this mean we can finally cure all conservatives? It's getting kind of annoying having their fear overwhelm the nation, thinking people are going to blow up planes with a can of diet pepsi, some mentos, and an old gym shoe. Or that terrrrrrrrrerrrrrrrists are going to blow up their trailer park or petting zoo.

Seriously, this totally sissified fear conservatives have is (and always HAS been) completely off the hook. It's going to be great to know they can finally stop wetting their pants when they see their own shadows.

Re:Bzzt! Wrong.

[kestasjk]

Modern fears like fear of electrical sockets you mentioned earlier? Fear of electrical sockets, debt, WMD*, escalators, guns, etc are of course not innate. Fear of heights, pain, fast moving crawling things, the dark, these are fears that you would expect to be innate and that seem to be innate. *(note to no-one in particular: it's WMD not WMDs)

Re:Bzzt! Wrong.

[Ren.Tamek]

"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."

It is innate, it's called a Fixed Action Pattern [wikipedia.org]. Blinking when something approaches your eye, yawning and pulling away when you touch something painful are all examples of innate responses to negative stimuli. Whether that's really fear or not is all down to semantics.

Your marine example is very good actually, and is the exception that proves the rule: in order to be useful, fear must not only be learned, but unlearned. If we retained every fear we ever had, people over the age of about 20 would be so paralysed with fear they wouldn't be able to leave the house. Exposure to a negative experience can have bizzare and over the top reactions, but continued exposure causes the reaction to decay as you become used to the stimuli. Even FAPs can be unlearned. However, you are born with them fully intact.

Disclaimer: IAABMBIOGA22 (I Am A Biology Major But I Only Got A 2-2)