Hi all, first time diarist, long time lurker...
In my forays into the tubes I came across something recently, an article on pscycho-biological experiments being done on mice at MIT, that seemed rather inane at first glance. Basically, they found the cure for "irrational fear" in mice, and feel strongly they can duplicate this in people. An article about the experiment explains that this can be a magic pill, that when used with other psychotherapy, can cure or severely reduce the affects of chronic anxiety or Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
But, when you also consider even broader an innoculation against irrational fear, well...follow below the fold.
I'll start by saying that I'm no scientist, but I do have a background as an Army interrogator (evil, boo-hiss...I know), but I did attempt to find my way out after a 9 year career as soon as the Iraq War started, and I'm attempting a redemption of sorts as a video game designer for the last 3 years where I can slip in ethical themes when the "man" isn't looking. Research into new science and psychology searching for the cool nuggets to spin into the next new video game entertainment experience is what leads me to this kind of research.
In the game Splinter Cell, there is a scene in which the player, a secret agent in a world of double-crossing, is told through his head set to eliminate a female companion which has already helped him immensely through half the game's experience. Players were free to ignore the order as a sort of "ethical dilemma", but a vast majority did as asked with no hesitation or added explanation during game test sessions. Being told this during a creative design meeting, I went back to my desk to find out exactly why and figure out how to present the ethical dilemma my colleagues were trying for.
This led me to The Authoritarians, an exceptionally well-written (though in some places badly cited) e-book. The message I came away with after reading this though is that FEAR, and its bastard step-children phobia, insecurity, and hate, lies behind almost every talking point and how propoganda works and is the "tie that binds" among all the seeming cognitive dissonance in conservative culture, especially in the US.
Fear is the means of authoritarian control. Fear, as Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" pointed out, is the mainstay of American news and infotainment for a long time. Before O'Reilly was 700 Club in the '80's playing to the same crowd, using the same distortion of reality to invoke the same amount of fear, and I'm sure before that there was something else (being an 80's kid though, I can't go much before that).
All of us are subject to it, some more than others. Some of us have the ability to rationally re-order our priorities given various amounts of time. Some people lack those kinds of psychological defenses for various reasons. This is what I found hope for when I stumbled on this article citing this recent study from MIT and published in Nature Neuroscience.
Cdk5, paired with the protein p35, helps new brain cells, or neurons, form and migrate to their correct positions during early brain development, and the MIT researchers looked at how Cdk5 affects the ability to form and eliminate fear-related memories.
"Remarkably, inhibiting Cdk5 facilitated extinction of learned fear in mice," Tsai said. "This data points to a promising therapeutic avenue to treat emotional disorders and raises hope for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or phobia."
Emotional disorders such as post-traumatic stress and panic attacks stem from the inability of the brain to stop experiencing the fear associated with a specific incident or series of incidents.
For some people, upsetting memories of traumatic events do not go away on their own, or may even get worse over time, severely affecting their lives...especially if they are continuously enabled by certain forms of "infotainment"- PolecatEZ
My first reaction was "awesome", my brothers still in arms can have a hope of recovering part of their minds when they finally get to come home. PTSD is very real and has very real consequences on returning from a high-stress environment. Often its not the long deployments that break up marriage and families, but the after effects. This is a good thing on the surface. But it gets better the more I started playing the "What If?" game with this concept of curing irrational fear.
I'm not talking about rational fear, the one where you base a course of action on your chances of survival based on known situations...like looking both ways before you cross a street and seeing a car coming, decide to wait for the car to pass before stepping out. I'm talking about irrational fear, people who maybe were tagged by a car as a child and so no longer cross streets at all if they can possibly help it, even with no cars in sight.
This same irrational fear is what allows terrorists to be somewhat effective, and authoritarians (American conservatives et al.) to hold absolute sway by controlling a message of fear. This is the cornerstone of how propoganda is effective. Your mental resistance to and recovery from fear is what makes you able to participate in rational discourse.
So my "what if" was "What if they could innoculate you against irrational fear as a child like any other booster shot?" What would society be like when people had no fear of telling off their boss? What would society become if 60 years of propoganda psychology suddenly needed to be thrown in the garbage can? What if FauxNews and conservative talk radio became completely irrelevant to anyone? What if homophobia, xenophobia, and racism could be cured with a shot like any other disease?
And then I thought about the administration of the "cure"...would it be like in the Matrix movie with the red pill/blue pill? Should we do this from birth instead without giving our children a choice like circumcision? Would the religious right and/or corporate lobbies squash this kind of research once they figured out the implications? And then the evil thought...if they can cure it with a pill, they can also induce it with a pill (or food supplement, water supplement like flouride, etc.) My peanut M&M fetish will no longer be safe...and so my own paranoia sets in again.
I'll conclude by saying that this isn't a "cure-all", this won't stamp out all the evils of the world. Its not a cure for selfishness, anger, or greed along with their own bastard step-children (could we find a pill to cure those too?). In any case, please forgive me for seeing one of the most profound scientific discoveries in what would otherwise be just another drug for mood disorders and thank you for taking the ride into "what-if" land.