Neuroscientists use neurofeedback to erase fear in the brain

By Christian Jarrett Imagine a person is terrified of dogs because they once suffered a terrible bite. Following long-established techniques, their psychologist might gradually expose them to dogs in a safe setting, until their fear gradually faded away. This “exposure therapy” can be effective but it has some serious drawbacks, including the fact that the person might at first find it traumatic to be close to dogs again. What if there were a way to remove this person’s fear of dogs at a subconscious level, without the need for any traumatic exposure? Such an approach has now come much closer to clinical reality thanks to a new study reported recently in Nature Human Behaviour. The findings suggest that neurofeedback can be used to unlearn a fear by pairing relevant non-conscious neural activity with a reward, such as money. Significant technical hurdles remain before this becomes a real-life treatment, but it’s an exciting breakthrough.  Ai Koizumi at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan and her colleagues trained 17 participants (11 men) to fear two colourful grating patterns presented on a computer screen by repeatedly pairing the patterns with safe but unpleasant electric shocks. Toward the end of this session, measures of the participants’ electrodermal response (skin sweatiness) to the sight of the two patterns confirmed that they now found them aversive. Prior to the fear-induction, the researchers had also scann...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Brain Emotion Mental health Source Type: blogs