insisted the shop's benefits far outweigh the risks britain says it will now offer alternative jobs to adults under 30. you're watching t.v. news up next we got a documentary for you looking at the science behind fear i'm terry mark thanks for watching. lola. people have to say matters to us. that's why most into their stories. reporter every weekend on d w. primal

emotion. was an instinctual response. but for something so fundamental fear is still a mystery. why are some people frozen by phobia while others seem like super humans. serious really doesn't exist the mind is saying this. is frozen. cannot deepest fears be overcome and should we even try shoes of a living breathing case study of what life would be like without fear or could fear in fact be good for us. to survive before the zombies if you're always out thanks can you bear to find out. thank you.

sticks there's nothing like a walk through a haunted house there's thrills and chills. and shrieks of laughter. but facing your deepest fears is no laughing matter. oh miles. there's no better place to study fear than at its most extreme. they think oh my live and they come that's this effort of course. merriam can a gator is terrified of chickens the instant she sees a chicken her memory tells her body to go on high alert. well

myself right. but you see it is really irrational behavior. even there goes. and even though they realize that there is no real threat the moment that they are in the situation they rest as if there is your real danger and that they will die. our brain does not differentiate between whether the fear is rational or not. but it is real danger or no real danger miriam is here with dr merrill can't of the university of amsterdam in a radical attempt to cure paralyzing fear. that one little pill a known heart medication appears to wipe away fear. 24 hours later dr kent accompanies miriam back to the rooster is it.

40 years what do you feel. you let's relax. here. full denethor they found that. the motivation. for payback now. it is in are shown that if you can do this right. from crying in fear to tears of relief a phobia is gone. yet she spoke to the rooster as almost a new friends. say yeah that's what's right said have coffee and sing and. impressive. reports of a cure for fear have attracted a lot of attention to talk to kim's clinic eva holland has come all the way from canada to see what she can do about how fear of heights. she's writing

a book on her experiences with fear and was initially skeptical about this therapy it sounds like science fiction but this single pill of the 2 minute exposure will cure your decades long phobia it doesn't even seem like convincing science fiction but the more i read about it it was it was clear that it seemed to be working for people. i personally feel his doctor can streetman taste based on a new understanding of how fear memories walk it's not understood that they are not fixed in storage like a photograph bought that they get periodic lee resave and a malleable. let me kill his 1st trick in a fear memory by exposing people to a situation or stimulus that they feel they have i get really freaked generally freaks out yet. so we trick it is what we call fear memory.

here and then what is important is that something new should happen. because this is a signal to the brain to update. the memory. and if that happens that means that the memory trace is temporarily in an i d's civilize states. what's new in this case is that even really tries to take in the experience and not look away oh god you really are can't go higher and higher but you are doing well for a while. when dr ken feels that even as fear has been fully triggered i return to the ground. i'm still shaking. hands with her again move it away.

until out. try to next try to explain. that i wanted to follow the instructions to the letter i wasn't supposed to do anything that might trigger me to feel afraid at all. and just kind of try to stay in a little bubble until i went to sleep. the idea of restating the memory happens during the night. but to me disrupt this process by giving the client a pill of propranolol. the pill has been used for years as hard medication but when administered under exact conditions it also blocks the work of a neurotransmitter involved in reciting memories. the memory has been changed in a way that it doesn't trigger this very strong fear response the next day eva and

dr kent are back at the fire station looking looking at the bucket yet still that's against the foot. so far as a lot better than yesterday yeah. if you change position because here you feel boredom when you didn't shut down all. as soon as we lifted off the ground to felt completely different the day before. he went all the way to the budget's upper limit and it was windier i think than even the day before the budget was shaking and i kept waiting to get scared if they did it like yesterday when i believe i was going to fall over. it felt like a completely different experience. every time when i see my clients being so scared it's really intense to be good to what i'm doing i think it's necessary that i also feel it and to see the difference is there relief happiness this is extremely rewarding. in cork and if behavior therapy

still many people that show reacts oh i could name a meaning. in traditional therapy a person nuns to overcome their fear by approaching then trigger over and over again then limits each time what happens in the brain is better for new memory trace is formed to be a close call it a sort of states memory or an inhibitory memory an additional memory competes fisty or which an unfair memory. or to fear memory remains intact and this explains that people may relapse because if your memory is so strong. a hand not so difficult to reinstate the fear response. so even though they know that they shouldn't be afraid of spiders if you shouldn't be afraid of dogs or chickens or whatever they cannot change that's and so to

a certain. fraction into brain between the hope and part of the brain are rational thinking and the emotional part brain and this is searching. challenge from. what is new is that we can change the emotional memory or to fear memory itself instead of only forming a new memory trace that competes with the fear memories. these new insights of fear learning and memory are at the forefront of science. well. he. says. the. fear is not something dr kent recommends. if i think of a life it's not a fear to feel. quite empty my greatest fear is that something

bad happens to my children so i realize that's even though it is not just a nice feeling of forest that is the other side of the love. that are few for my children. but how is it that some people panic before chickens spiders or heights while others. like connell the mellow seem to have no fear at home. as a motocross stunt champion from all over canada when i was 3 years old i got my 1st her bike up this kind of riding bikes up and down the road. my school friends bigger bigger steeper steeper go higher bigger distances. under tarps a commitment on the streets and as a consequence is a can be very high will we see it from here in this 1st round yes. it's.

undeterred by pain. bike immediately trying to stomp again. so we're trying to see. why. i. hate us. when tricks have gone wrong in our brush myself and then i get near to get to say 10 tries 20 tries maybe a 100 tries the feeling where when something you aren't there been done. your energy spice up your german spice up. the sequel so you know you really did go to the 1st robots no but this is their. theory it really doesn't exist it exists in our mind but that's it and when you face it it's gone.

it actually kind of becomes addicting. non-com has come to vanderbilt university nashville in the us to work with david sound who wants to know how deals with thea or if he feels it's a total what's my story i wanted to make music and film video and write soundtracks but somehow that didn't work out i ended up moving into neuroscience as a profession. con will undergo a brain scan. doctors out wasn't you scary pictures just to calm you would know that they are fake instead he uses gory images that activate the same brain region that is triggered by threats. hard not to have an emotional response to these images and so it really challenges the person to be able to say up down on

that emotional experience that they have what i want you to do is try to reduce any emotional experience that you have during those pictures. if there is something special in connally's brain that makes him immune to fear doctors own well st. the next morning the results are in this is the area that we're particularly interested in. because it is really central to the experience fear. doctors all of can see that connell's visual cortex at the back of the brain lights up as it takes in the threatening information normally the a meter would be fired up as well but not connell's you're basically look quite

silent in that condition by contrast the visual cortex is still doing some amount of response in terms of trying to figure out what it seeing everything we looked at here how can we relate this to my writing it understand aspect of fear and how i deal with. there a couple things i think are relevant for you in particular one of them is that you do experience the fear of what can happen i remember my 1st attempt after this 1st stick crashes i was scared i was nervous i was shaking. but you show a really strong ability to down regulate that. that circuitry that's involved when people are anxious or afraid you can control it to enough of a degree that allows you to actually go forward to do the tricks to do the jumps.

on the great ability to clamp down on fear also appears to get an extra rush from overcoming it dr zoner studied how thrill seekers have a greater amount of dopamine a kind of reward chemical flowing through their brains. found is that where interest centered was something that's highly motivating they get a stronger response to for you i think you know throughout your life there's been that whole to do it. so you're telling me a little bit about preparing a new job yes so when it comes out for doctors around fearlessness is that the heart of what it means to be human. if we think about evolutionary history humans spread out across the entire globe and then their relatively short amount of time it looks like how how did we do that if you had to be able to overcome fears of

doing certain things that hadn't been done before the folks who can do that may have had a real advantage. so people like carl might be at the vanguard of human evolution. could it be that getting scared is actually good for us. no other creature on earth likes to get scammed quite the way humans do. you for it all 6. why do people pay to end a haunted houses and risk area. the better they have. chucked over for us is a 27 acre stream park and we have hordes all throughout the property. if they gave out ph d.'s in haunted house design sociologist. would teach the course

she's here in pennsylvania with patrick on appeals to give him some of the science behind his scams a finely tuned mix of psychology and physiology this room does a good job of taking childhood. dolls and toys things that we remember and regard with a lot of nostalgia and basically defiling really create such a big decision and such a violation of our childhood things that we think are supposed to be joyful and happy and now they're all the sunday opposite i remember a lot of light nightmares when i was younger and it had to do with things in my room. we mix the real actors as well as props all these so with a chaotic life very loud music they're not 100 percent sure what's going on.

our startle reflex does get saturated after repeated start in quick succession. when you start to tune it out. and here you do have an assault of the senses but it's in a confined space just enough time to really get this instant ramped up and then move on to something else so that the customer doesn't get over saturated. by smelling. fire smell we bring a device to emit that odor to immerse the customer our sense of smell is such a powerful sense it's tapped into our memories in such layered ways it's the only sense where we're actually sensing molecules from the environment that trigger the neurons to fire is a sensitive sense to tap into because if you do use too much discussed or a snarl that is so overwhelming it can quickly take

a customer out of the experience disgust and fear are different in the brain and the body the focus turns to just escaping that disgusting smell. moggy has traveled around the won't visiting haunted houses haunted forests roller coasters and just about anything else designed to scare. that's great. want to better understand the formula for. one thing she's not is that it's often things that deviate just a little too much from the norm the to stuff the most. clowns are terrifying people always wonder why are people afraid of clowns but really they have more in common with monsters than happy things because they have painted faces that makes their facial expressions really difficult to read you have somebody who has a painted on smile but their mouth is actually frowning you can't really get an

idea of what they're feeling or what they're going to do and it's dissonance it's our brain saying it is this person you know safe or not so they really are the perfect monster. what do you think how was it you couldn't really are you know it's crazy like a roller coaster of emotions because it's almost immediately scared and then it's almost a sense of relief when i left right we found that people you know after they have come out of the attraction and had a moment to collect themselves a feeling of almost euphoria because you've got all the endorphins that are released while you were scared and now you're safe the natural high is not just the intensity it's the relaxation that happens afterwards to. maybe a scam monster but tailoring the ultimate experience is not as easy as it seems. a fact not lost on video game designers who are taking fear as fun to

a whole new level. when we set up to scare somebody there's the 2 mean ways we look at it. the easy scare is the jump scare gets that leap out catch you by surprise kind of moment that is actually almost more startling than scary as far as i'm concerned the more effective way is kind of the the hitchcockian way to do things which is to lure you in and extend that moment the anticipation of the scare that's when we grab your heart and we start to squeeze just slowly at 1st a little tighter returning to the point where you're saying ok just enough get it over with brad firman john has helped design some big names in horror games including eternal darkness. he also teaches game design and george brown college in toronto. brad is advising one group of students on

a game they call rebuff. so rebirth is a 1st person horror game that places the player in the role of aggrieved mother who's lost her infant daughter and has undertaken a cult ritual in an attempt to resurrect her child. we join her in the middle of this ritual she has or see it to its conclusion in her suburban home where things are getting very very creepy. they've sent them project to theresa lynch of ohio university who uses video games to stop the fear these that we're placing on your feet are going to be capturing your skin conductance levels and what it's doing is sending a very very minimal electrical impulse being sent through the sensors that's interacting with the amount of sweat that's being produced in the glands of your foot along with a horror classic amnesia of a doctor sent to reason has agreed to test drive rebuff with us to tint alexis to

see how its feel factors at top games provide us this very interesting context in which we can study fear responses you have the ability to make decisions in the game with an agency that is not available and less interactive media to resist a quick munt plots the plans aren't right skin conductance and facial expression allowing ha and her assistant to break down the fan response into 3 stages as true in video games as they are in real life. in the pre encounter stage this is basically when you're might be a little bit anxious if you're in an environment that is signaling to you that there may be threats working my butt is that the 2nd stage is the actual encounter the body ramps stop for a fight or flight. not. pointing

to the distance between your idea. has narrowed. now if the threat is approaching you then we enter into what's referred to as the circus right stage where you're going to have to make a decision about whether you're going to try to run away from the threat or you're going to try to fight it. oh god now i did the rally i then just wrote to describe chaos so that's occurred over over a one on the scale so that was a pretty was the most dramatic change that we've seen so far. in the game isn't over but this plan is dumb. so we're just testing everything out on our end to make sure everything's working good to reason and the rebirth designers discuss how findings they especially want to know about the role of the senses in their game. as their various. things this is are.

we think of visual stimuli as being the thing that's going to be more scary just because it can be more extreme but when we are able to orient to visual stimuli in our environments we know a lot about it so i think there's a monster there it is i see it i know where it is now i can track it now i can respond to it we're actually much less shark in terms of our ability to detect and orient to sound so sound can definitely heightened fears sponsors anxiety and prepared nests without really giving the player something to latch on to you're just a simple little blast is really all you need it's it's cheap it's a fish of above all with so much about fear being learned from video games people are turning to video for treatment. well 1415 like a car just lean remember having this fear the balcony. sights in general is

comparison for me today i'm here to look at a bit deeper into what it is. if i could read it rid myself of that they'll be amazing. michael ampitheater has come to the university of quebec in gatineau to try on therapy with virtual reality see that how you see that death is really cool and because there is no ledge can actually forward jump. talk to stefan bush ah it's a pioneer in its use and has the world's most developed on lab for this very purpose 1st of all you have to put on this have sat. together with his assistant. mabel put michael through his virtual pacers the emotional part of the brain limbic system kicks in within 12 within seconds and the logical part of the brain comes afterwards so it means that we get emotional before we get logical so in virtual reality 4 percent sufficient virtual similar part of the brain that deals with

emotion believes or reacts as if it's true and even though it's not too late because emotions are there and what we want to do and terrapins build your strength in controlling those emotions it's confidence who want to build confidence that is safe coincidence that you're not drawn by the cliff or the void and confidence that if you feel your growth you can stay in control and actually pull back at you pace when you go to. the 1st step is for michael and to assess the severity of michael's condition we want to see what point you can climb up the ladder comfortably as soon as you start feeling that you don't want to keep going out you simply start if you come back.

if you are unafraid it's easy but when gripped by fear the imagination runs wild. in the latest dirty great. truth. and good. job michael now you can come down michael stops at the 5th rung and can go no higher with this treatment. so you simply grab this it was your son you could. get the choice to go. back at the lab a deep sinkhole has opened up in michael's new reality he must begin by moving towards it a big part of who wants to get a hold with a. body of higher alert. rose in state we want to show your body that it's ok because. i'm not just

a small town are you able to just be your arms down just a bit. slowly bring them down to your side. progress is slow but sure eventually michael attempts to walk a plank over the abyss ok my mother. was still there because we know. there isn't a what it is or a yes there's always try to convince you basically devastations you're trying to give it says a look of i'm doing dishes or it's 5 is. what makes virtual reality such a powerful therapy is that patients can do what is impossible or too dangerous in real life. one of the basic things that we could do for a fear of heights as you could actually chuck the whole back. so the further you go the less fear. i can feel the emotion of the feeling rushing through my stomach given i've been jumping. on the counter for 3 michael will leap into the

abyss. one to. see if it's not. my thing just go with my body just from. the. one to that. at that. if so were it because we thought of the was that. i was out this is no this was longer so there it cares a few more jumps and michael feels that he's gained some on story over his fear.

now it's back to the gym. patients usually do 8 to 10 vyas sessions before they hope to see a real improvement but michael is keen to try again. a good school but who would. come down. yesterday when we did test shots of the 1st step do you know where he got up to today. got a live one home so 678 died as tracey so yesterday froze here safe there that's amazing progress actually this is for. us with just one session michael has nearly doubled his height while no one is saying

he's conquered his fear he appears to be well on the way actually his. fear of heights is a widespread phobia good some deep and common fears innate. that is exactly what david rocker's son would like to know he scares babies for a living to see when fear takes root in the mind. you get a startle response from babies very early on babies will blink and move back from a looming object. that's not necessary evidence of ferrets and could just be an innate mechanism to avoid objects that are about to hit you. there are perhaps no other creatures as universally feared as these. i think that the fact that so many people have fears of snakes and spiders even though they're not afraid many of the faces of the live shows the evolutionary significance of them so i got me thinking

what would cause this privileged status for these snakes and spiders and so i started thinking how would i test that. how that they were x. and went into the infant cognition that this is maddy yes ok so today we're going to be running mattie in an experiment that tests how babies look at things like snakes and spiders and how they learn about the features on the properties of those things are back ok ready maddy there that is like yes and they. were. all. taking trackers that is not searching for signs of fear he's looking to see what captures the imprints attention. we show babies schematic versions of snakes and spiders and then we track how long the babies live in each of these images competitive scrabble versions of the same. and we find that if 5 months of base babies will track a snake like image longer than they will scramble versions of the snake and they

will do the same thing for spiders that little grab a schematic spider then scrabble versions of this by this but could it just be a familiar pattern or shape that catches the eye so we've tried using flowers say no effect for flowers which is about logically possible stimulus no effect for rodents or sharks. so it seems unlikely that it's a preference for a bug logically possible shape it seems rather that babies have this very specific bias to look at space snakes and spiders in particular and this correlates nicely with what we know about adult fish westlake the spiders are in the top 5 non-human animal fish at that adults have lead rather than proving innate fear david rocker's and believes this is proof of a kind of early warning defense system it seems as if there is no innate fear babies have to learn fears but i think that some things have a privileged status when it comes to feeling things like snakes and spiders these

are things the baby seems to learn to fear more rapidly than other things like cars . or cigarettes or god. humans have a full of rapidly learned the fish because individuals who didn't die. they were bitten and they go eat and those genes were passed on. so unless someone around the infant reacts the child won't necessarily be afraid when they see a snake. but as boys and girls grow fear differences do arise and david rock isn't has an idea about why. women are 4 times as likely to be fearful of slaves as fighters. over evolutionary time men who were unwilling to protect their family or to go to fight or to get resources or hunt with it but not being selected as mates to say the genes for being fearful that men have been selected against but if a woman dies

a baby is more likely to like than if the father dies so women likely have a valve to be somewhat safer to protect themselves and thus protect their own chart and so the genes for this specialized mechanism fail anybody passed on and spread through the population. somewhere among the millions of people in the us their lives a woman who knows no fear identity has been kept a secret for over 30 years you could walk by how on the street and never know. and yet superpower is helping unlock the mystery of how feel works in the mind. dr justin feinstein is one of the few people in the wild who knows who she is and what she's like i've had a chance to work with her both in laboratory settings and also in real world settings for about 15 years. she's known only as an ass. and

she lacks fear because she lacks a part of her grain. she is one of the only humans walking around earth without her nicola. she has this condition known as feet a disease and for a reason that science still has not figured out the condition will go into the brain and selectively calcified you make a lot on both sides of the brain and this is exactly what happened to patient s. that. there was a lot of people around her who were part of the drug trade. had reported to the police that she didn't want any of these people in her community one day she was sitting outside of her apartment and a stranger comes out of the blue puts a gun to her head and yells the top of his lungs. and then runs off.

about 20 minutes after this occurs the police knock on her door. because a neighbor saw this unfold they were quite concerned. and the police said you know explain what happened who was this guy and she was very surprised to even see the police it didn't register on her radar that this was a serious of that that it just occurred. as am's extreme condition man allow science to finally understand how feo walks in the brain. dr feinstein has spent years of his life trying to scare ass am not even the scariest of films like this one caused her to flinch and then he decided to threaten her from within. internal threats these are threats that are coming

through the body itself through changes say your heart rate or your respiratory pattern and when the brain processes those changes it interprets it as fear or in some cases even panic. this is going to measure your. heart rate in oxygen saturation just as he is doing with this woman in his lab dr feinstein decided to see what would happen if he interfered with s. ams respiratory system. first time we tried this was with what's known as 35 percent c o 2 when the body detects the intake of too much carbon dioxide it can become alarmed for during and after each breath rate how much inside you feel using. normally people feel some anxiety. or hypothesis going into the experiment was that i would not experience fear or panic to the c

o 2. took a single vital capacity breath of $22.00. and we finally found her kryptonite. elicited immediate fear response. she referred to it as the most intense fear she's ever felt in her entire life. it was extremely eye opening i think if you could of looked at my face that it would have been sort of the look of a deer in headlights. and with that one breath signs learned that the amygdala is not the brains only fear center this fear that your life is in danger and could end at any moment. does not require the. it somewhere

else of the brain this is. what our research is currently trying to do is figure out where is this other pathway besides advancing to science as m. is inspiring dr johnston feinstein to dream a little to dream about the evolution of human fear what's fascinating to me about s.f. is the fact that she's lived a half a century. without make. and somehow she's managed to survive and i think that tells us something important about the evolution of species. we still live in a dangerous world threats are always going to be. but we're living in a society that has basically endowed us with all of our basic survival needs. when you don't have to live in a world of saber tooth tigers and lions attacking. maybe that's one fear is no

longer and necessary emotion. but we're not there. one continent. 700000000 people. with their own personal stories. europe. we explored every day life for. what europeans fear and what they hope for. some good slot in the world. in the 90 minutes on d w. there's no. doubt managers do not go to day nothing to

change you know the banks. and so watch the language of the bank money. for speaking the truth global news that matters d. w. me for mines. but i get right to the heart. of 3 presidents. they are good for the. warming doesn't. include the most well thought yet. the industry is controlling your thoughts the great books of the 20th century. present a hoax those. upgraded no more. shorts may 3rd.

place. this is g.w. news live from berlin changing course on the astra zeneca vaccine several countries suspend the use of the backseat for people under 60 after european regulators less blood clots as a potential to wear side effect will take a closer look after finding. also coming up brazil confirms its 1st case of a highly contagious variant of the corona.