Why is phobia a memory problem
Transcriber: egemen soylu
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Fear feels awful, but it’s
a very useful emotion
as it helps us to avoid
dangerous situations.
However, fear of an object or situation
can also be groundless or exaggerated.
Then it’s called phobia. Phobias are very
common, in particular, fear of spiders,
fear of heights and fear
of public speaking,
especially fear of giving TED talks.
But let’s be serious.
Phobias can be very burdensome and
interfere with your personal
and professional goals. So where
do phobias come from
and why does memory play your own? Take
somebody with fear of public speaking.
He or she may have had a very embarrassing
experience in the past.
Well, and a very strong fear memory
has been formed when today.
This fear memory gets activated
and triggers to fear response.
Now somebody with a fear of spiders
may not be able to recall
a bad experience with a spider. So
where did the fear come from?
Either from an experience in early
childhood when it was too early to form
conscious memories or this
fear memory is innate.
In both cases, memory is
central to phobia.
So if that’s the case, few should be
reduced if you block this memory.
But how can you block memory?
Twenty years ago, our research
group discovered that
the stress hormone cortisol has exactly
this effect in stressful exams.
It is the reason why you may have problems
to recall what you have learned.
So in phobias we tested if this hormone
can reduce fear symptoms by reducing
fear memories. And it did in spider
phobia and social phobia
and in fear of heights, we are now working
on possible treatment protocols.
But it’s too early for clinical use.
But there’s another way to silence
the fear memory you build up
an even stronger memory of safety,
and that’s what’s done
in exposure therapy,
where the patient is gradually
exposed to the feared object
or situation in real life and learns
that it’s not dangerous.
After successful therapy, this memory
of safety becomes stronger than
the original fear memory and the phobic
response is reduced or even absent.
Even though conventional exposure
therapy is highly effective,
there are two problems. First,
it’s not offered by many therapists
because they would have to get
the spider a snake or take their
patients to a tower.
Second, most patients had to be exposed
to a real feared object or situation.
So the solution could be to do it
yourself with an unreal object
or situation. And that’s what we do in our
lab with the development of virtual
and augmented reality apps
for smartphones.
And DVR app to reduce fear of heights,
you start by standing on a platform
at ground level,
important you only go higher
when your fear is low.
Like this, you go higher and higher
without ever experiencing high levels of
fear. If you do the app repeatedly,
you can reach up to 70 meters
above the ground.
But does this help in real life?
We tested that on a watchout
tower in a clinical study.
As compared to the control group,
subjects who used the app over a
two week period at home showed
a significant reduction in fear,
the app was in fact equally effective
as conventional therapy.
We also developed an augmented reality
app to reduce fear of spiders.
In this app, a virtual spider
is added to the real world
and you have to do several
tasks as, for example,
holding your phone tightly because
the spider will jump on it.
This is obviously an advanced level.
If you use the app repeatedly, the
reward is that at the end,
you will actually start to like
the spider and you will see
the spider will like you too.
If you suffer from a phobia, your
enemy is your fear memory,
with the advances in research
and technology,
it’s now easier than ever to build
up a strong memory of safety,
which silences the fear memory and thereby
brings relief. Thank you.