Ever wondered if you could cure the jitters caused by heights? Or wanted to combat your aversion to clowns? Researchers believe they've found a new way to remove specific fears from the brain that is easy on the patient.
Neuroscientists from Cambridge University, Japan and the United States -- who published their technique in the journal Nature Human Behaviour -- were interested in finding a new form of therapy that was less emotionally draining than current methods.
In their paper, researchers note a common approach to combating fears involves a form of aversion therapy which can upset patients. Aversion therapies work by having patients associate a bad habit, or in this case a fear, with an unpleasant effect in a bid to stop the behaviour.
The new technique, dubbed Decoded Neurofeedback, uses brain scanning to monitor the brain's activity and then identifies patterns of activity that they say resemble a memory of a specific fear.
The scientists tested the method by taking 17 volunteers and administering brief electric shocks when they saw a certain computer image. Researchers were able to identify a pattern of brain activity associated with seeing the image, and then overwrote the fear memory by giving the subjects a reward.
The challenge, they said, was to overwrite a fear without forcing the patient to relive the fear.
"We realized that even when the volunteers were simply resting, we could see brief moments when the pattern of fluctuating brain activity had partial features of the specific fear memory, even though the volunteers weren't consciously aware of it," said Ben Seymour, of the University of Cambridge's engineering department. "Because we could decode these brain patterns quickly, we decided to give subjects a reward -- a small amount of money -- every time we picked up these features of the memory."
Over the course of a few days, the group of researchers rewarded patients when the brain activity was seen, with a goal of gradually and unconsciously overriding the negative memory.
"In effect, the features of the memory that were previously tuned to predict the painful shock, were now being re-programmed to predict something positive instead," said lead researcher Ai Koizumi, from the Advanced Telecommunicatons Research Institute International, Kyoto and Centre of Information and Neural Networks on Osaka.
She says that by the end, patients were able to see the computer image that had once been accompanied by electric shocks and not show any fear either physically or in scans of their brain.
Researchers say they hope their findings can be developed into clinical treatment for patients with PTSD or phobias.
