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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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I have to just comment here about the trend amongst homeowners who put tin stars on their homes.
Pretty generic already, it isn’t trendy anymore, you should probably take them down.
But as I was walking through my neighborhood of destruction (we had a minor tornado) one of the tin stars on someone’s house had flipped upside-down so it looked like an inverted pentagram.
The star in general is one of the most ancient symbols:
It is in fact still a pentagram regardless if the center is filled in or not.
You are basically broadcasting a powerful symbol out there into the universe (inverted or not) and I would bet this attracts entities both good and not so good right to the very place you should feel the safest - your home.
At least that is my theory…I still have yet to go door to door to homes with tin stars on them and knock on doors to ask if weird shit is going on in their house.
It just seems like a very ignorant thing to do to…most people don't know what kind of power these things can have.
I’m not saying that all stars on your home will attract things, entities, etc. there is the idea of intention being placed on it as well.
I work very hard to make my house as “invisible” and “impenetrable" as possible to negative entities…I will certainly never put a big ass star on it.
Pretty generic already, it isn’t trendy anymore, you should probably take them down.
But as I was walking through my neighborhood of destruction (we had a minor tornado) one of the tin stars on someone’s house had flipped upside-down so it looked like an inverted pentagram.
The star in general is one of the most ancient symbols:
It is in fact still a pentagram regardless if the center is filled in or not.
You are basically broadcasting a powerful symbol out there into the universe (inverted or not) and I would bet this attracts entities both good and not so good right to the very place you should feel the safest - your home.
At least that is my theory…I still have yet to go door to door to homes with tin stars on them and knock on doors to ask if weird shit is going on in their house.
It just seems like a very ignorant thing to do to…most people don't know what kind of power these things can have.
I’m not saying that all stars on your home will attract things, entities, etc. there is the idea of intention being placed on it as well.
I work very hard to make my house as “invisible” and “impenetrable" as possible to negative entities…I will certainly never put a big ass star on it.
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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Annabelle: The True Story of a Demonic Doll
By Rob Morphy
The smash hit motion picture “The Conjuring” – based on the harrowing story of the Perron family’s encounter with an evil entity and how they were saved by controversial demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren – has earned tens of millions of dollars and spawned as many nightmares worldwide.
But while the core story of possession and witchcraft may have propelled the plot forward, it is the allegedly true story of a demonic doll named Annabelle that has left a lingering shadow on the memories of moviegoers across the globe; transforming this arguably inanimate (and ostensibly cursed) object into a surprise pop-culture phenomenon.
Let me be frank right from the outset: “I hate dolls.”
Always have.
It started with a dotty old great-aunt, who (of course) lived in a dusty, labyrinthine manor full of long corridors, peeling wallpaper, the lingering scent of mothballs and rooms that all seemed to have at least one porcelain doll with a cracked face that leered menacingly down at me from whatever perch it had made home.
As my beard began to transform from random Klingon-like patches into a cohesive whole and my school days drifted farther and farther into my past, I began to dismiss those childhood fears.
I convinced myself that fearing inanimate objects was foolish, but I still harbored an intuitive distaste for dolls; especially old ones.
While looking for curios in old thrift stores and junk shops, I would always grow uneasy when I would catch a figurine or (God forbid) a marionette unmistakably staring at me with its glassy, dead eyes and a bio-electric chill would ripple up my neck.
Oh, I’d act cool (especially if I was with my girlfriend) and chuckle and tell myself that it was all in my head, but a part of me knew better… and that’s how I knew, when I hunkered down to watch the aforementioned film, “The Conjuring”, that I had been right all along.
The Original Devil Doll
Like all cinematic depictions of purportedly factual stories, the filmmakers responsible for “The Conjuring” have taken some liberties with the source material.
The bizarre case of Annabelle is no exception, as the pig tailed, rosy cheeked, ghastly apparition from the movie was, in actuality, a run of the mill Raggedy Ann doll.
Now, for the seven of you out there who might not know what that is, Raggedy Ann is an adorable rag doll with a triangle nose and a mop of red yarn for hair.
The character was created by writer (and marketing genius) Johnny Gruelle when his daughter brought him an old doll and he drew a face on it.
Gruelle would go on to feature the character in a series of children’s books he wrote and, following the tragic death of his daughter, as the symbol for a virulent anti-vaccination campaign.
On September 7, 1915, he received a U.S. Patent for his Raggedy Ann doll and with it a toy legend was born.
The Birthday Gift
The particular doll in question, the one which would serve as the inspiration for James Wan’s disturbing plaything in “The Conjuring”, was first purchased in an antique shop in 1970, by a woman looking for a unique birthday present for her daughter, Donna.
The woman, who’s name (much like the ark from “Raiders”) has evidently been lost somewhere in the annals of paranormal research, must have concluded that the antiquated, child-sized rag doll would be the perfect gift for her daughter who was just about to graduate from nursing school.
Apparently she was correct in her assumption and, even though Donna was not known to be a collector of dolls, she happily brought the object into to the apartment that she shared with another nursing student, Angie.
Once there the Raggedy Ann doll was tossed on the bed and promptly forgotten about… for the first few days anyway.
At initial the signs that something was amiss were subtle.
From time to time, Donna would notice that the toy seemed to have changed position slightly, but simply attributed it to a jostling of the bed or something equally mundane.
As the weeks passed, however, the doll’s erratic movements became more troubling and both Donna and Angie became genuinely alarmed when they returned home to find the rag doll standing upright and leaning against a chair in the dining room, as if it had frozen mid-step when it heard the door open.
It was then that Donna and Angie realized that there was something truly bizarre about the doll.
Donna would later describe the unsettling situation to renowned paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren.
According to Donna:
“I put it on my bed each morning after the bed was made.
The arms would be off to its sides and its legs would be straight out – just like it’s sitting there now.
But when we’d come home at night, the arms and legs would be positioned in different gestures.
For instance, its legs would be crossed at the ankles, or its arms would be folded in its lap.
After a week or so, this made us suspicious.
So to test it, I purposely crossed its arms and legs in the morning to see if it really was moving.
And sure enough, every night when we’d come back home, the arms and legs would be uncrossed and the thing would be sitting there in any of a dozen different postures.”
At times Donna would leave the doll on the bed only to find that it had mysteriously migrated to the living room and was now sitting on the couch with its arms and legs crossed almost indignantly.
In other instances, Donna would leave the doll on the couch only to return home to discover that it was now in her bedroom – with the door latched shut!
Angie shed some more light on this odd increase in apparently paranormal activity:
“The doll also changed rooms by itself.
We came home one night and the Annabelle doll was sitting in a chair by the front door.
It was kneeling!
The funny thing about it was, when we tried to make the doll kneel, it’d just fall over.
It couldn’t kneel.
Other times we’d find it sitting on the sofa, although when we left the apartment in the morning it’d be in Donna’s room with the door closed!”
Messages from Beyond
The girls, becoming more and more perturbed by this strange turn of events, decided to confide in a male friend that the Warrens’ chronicle only as “Lou”.
Lou claimed that he realized that something about the doll was evil the moment he laid eyes on it.
Donna and Angie, though made anxious by the toy’s clandestine mobility, were not prepared to believe that anything insidious was afoot.
That was when curious notes began to appear around the apartment.
Donna and Angie both found strips of parchment paper upon which would be scrawled the words “HELP US” or “HELP LOU” in a conspicuously child-like fashion, although in the movie the filmmakers apparently decided that “MISS ME?” would be for unnerving.
This startling development perplexed Donna:
“It would leave us little notes and messages.
The handwriting looked to be that of a small child… Lou wasn’t in any kind of jeopardy at the time.
And who ‘us’ was we didn’t know.
Still, the thing that was weird was that the notes would be written in pencil, but when we tried to find one, there was not one pencil in the apartment!
And the paper it wrote on was parchment.
I tore the apartment apart, looking for parchment paper, but again neither of us had any such thing.”
Lou became convinced that these notes were from the doll, which was attempting to communicate with its human hosts.
But the nurses, being women of science, began to wonder if someone they knew might not have come across a door key and decided to have some fun at their expense by playing an elaborate hoax on them.
To that end, Donna and Angie became amateur sleuths and began marking windows and arranging carpets against the doors to reveal if they had any intruders in their absence.
Much to their chagrin their traps lay unmoved while the doll continued to have it’s run of the apartment.
Still, the roommates took solace from that fact that while they might have a “living doll” sharing their home, it seemed not to have any nefarious intentions.
In fact, according to Donna, that Christmas the odd being even seemed to offer them a small present:
“Christmas, we found a little chocolate boot on the stereo that none of us had bought.
Presumably it came from Annabelle.”
Sadly, the state of affairs with the entity living in their home would not remain harmonious for long.
Angie recalled another seemingly supernatural occurrence in the apartment:
“One time a statue lifted up across the room, then it tumbled in the air and fell on the floor.
None of us were near the statue; it was on the other side of the room.
That incident frightened us totally.”
Things would only get worse from that moment on.
The Bleeding Doll
Less than two months after these bizarre events began, Donna and Angie returned home, weary after a long day of school.
Of course, neither of the women were particularly surprised to find that the doll had managed to make its way from the living room back into Donna’s bed, but this time Donna claimed that she suddenly was struck by a feeling that something was wrong and that the doll seemed to have a ominous aura about it.
Hesitantly, the women approached the doll and that was when they noticed that the inanimate object was oozing blood from its hands and chest.
Angie described the scene:
“The Annabelle doll was sitting on Donna’s bed, as was usual.
When we came home one night, there was blood on the back of its hand, and there were three drops of blood on its chest!”
Added Donna:
“God, that really scared us!”
The now terrified roommates decided that they would have to seek the help of someone more experienced in paranormal activity than themselves.
It was then that they decided to call in…
The Medium
Following the “bleeding doll” incident, the roommates resolved to find out just what it was that they were sharing their apartment with.
To that end, Donna and Angie decided to contact a medium in order to conjure up and communicate with whatever was inhabiting the doll.
The unidentified medium agreed to perform a séance in the nurses’ apartment.
In Donna’s own words:
“So Angie and I got in touch with a woman who’s a medium.
That was about a month, or maybe six weeks after all this stuff started to happen.”
The medium wasted no time in entering a trance and before long she was weaving a heartbreaking tale of a young girl named Annabelle Higgins, whose body was discovered in the field upon which their apartment complex had been constructed.
According to Donna:
“We learned that a little girl died on this property, She was seven years-old and her name was Annabelle Higgins.
The Annabelle spirit said she played in the fields long ago before these apartments were built.
They were happy times for her.
She told us.”
The medium was unable to ascertain the details of the girl’s death, but in telling Annabelle’s story, she had inadvertently tugged at the heartstrings of these compassionate, young women.
Donna continued to detail Annabelle’s plight as heard through the medium:
“Because everyone around here was grown-up, and only concerned with their jobs, there was no one she (Annabelle) could relate to, except us.
Annabelle felt that we would be able to understand her.
That’s why she began moving the rag doll.
All Annabelle wanted was to be loved, and so she asked if she could stay with us and move into the doll.
What could we do?
So we said yes.”
Angie would explain the logic behind their decision:
“It seemed harmless enough.
We’re nurses, you know, we see suffering every day.
We had compassion.
Anyway, we called the doll Annabelle from that time on.”
There is no way that these kind women could have imagined at the time just how terrible a mistake inviting this apparently innocent apparition to live inside the rag doll would prove to be.
The Nightmare Begins
As things between the newly christened Annabelle and her roommates seemed to be entering a new phase of détente, Lou maintained that he sensed something dangerous about the itinerant doll and admonished Donna to get rid of it.
She refused his request, feeling that getting rid of the doll would be the equivalent of abandoning a child.
But even though Annabelle was not removed, it seems apparent that she was not pleased by Lou’s interference.
Lou understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the doll, but was not prepared for the hellish encounter he would have when it followed him home.
The Warrens related the experience Lou had not long after turning in for the night:
“Lou awoke one night from a deep sleep and in panic.
Once again he had a reoccurring bad dream.
Only this time somehow, something seemed different.
It was as though he was awake but couldn’t move.
He looked around the room but couldn’t discern anything out of the ordinary and then it happened.
Looking down toward his feet he saw the doll, Annabelle.”
Lou continued to recount his petrifying experience:
“While I was lying there, I saw myself wake up.
Something seemed wrong to me.
I looked around the room, but nothing was out of place.
But then when I looked down toward my feet, I saw the rag doll, Annabelle.
It was slowly gliding up my body.
It moved over my chest and stopped.
Than it put its arms out.
One arm touched one side of my neck, the other touched the other side like it was making an electrical connection.
Then I saw myself being strangled.
I might as well have been pushing on a wall, because it wouldn’t move.
It was literally strangling me to death, I couldn’t help myself, no matter how hard I tried.”
The Warrens concluded the harrowing tale:
“Paralyzed and gasping for breath Lou, at the point of asphyxiation, blacked out.
Lou awoke the next morning, certain it wasn’t a dream.
Lou was determined to rid himself of that doll and the spirit that possessed it.”
Lou felt as if whatever was animating the doll was warning him to mind his own business, but out of concern for his friends, he refused to be deterred.
It would be back at Donna and Angie’s apartment that Annabelle would strike again.
The following evening, while preparing for a road trip, Lou and Angie were alone, studying maps in in the living room just before 11 pm.
Without warning, the pair heard an odd shuffling sound emanating from Donna’s room.
Angie was concerned that someone might have broken into the apartment, but Lou feared that it might be something much worse.
Lou, summoning a courage that I’m not sure I could replicate, crept toward Donna’s bedroom door.
He paused outside the entrance until the sounds abated, then eased the door open and anxiously flipped on the light switch.
The room was empty, save for Annabelle, which seemed to have been haphazardly thrown into the corner of the room.
Lou entered the space and apprehensively approached the crumpled rag doll.
It was then that he claimed to have felt a tingling sensation on the back of his neck, as if he was being watched from behind.
Lou explained the feeling in an interview with the Warrens:
“But as I got close to the doll, I got the distinct impression that somebody was behind me.
I swung around instantly and, well….”
At this point Angie interjected:
“He won’t talk about that part.
When Lou turned around there wasn’t anybody there, but he suddenly yelled and grabbed for his chest.
He was doubled over, cut and bleeding when I got to him.
Blood was all over his shirt.
Lou was shaking and scared and we went back out into the living room.
We then opened his shirt and there on his chest was what looked to be a sort of claw mark!”
On his chest were seven slices.
Four were horizontal and three vertical.
Both the Warrens, Donna and Angie confirmed that the wounds existed, but unfortunately no one bothered to take any photographs.
Oddly, the Marks (which Lou claimed burned horribly and actually radiated heat) were all but gone the next day and completely vanished a mere forty-eight hours later.
Enter the Warrens
Not sure where else to turn – and now realizing that they were dealing with something much worse than the benign spirit of a lonely child – the trio decided to contact a someone in the clergy.
The first man they got a hold of was an Episcopalian priest named Father Hegan.
Hegan went to the apartment and allowed the witnesses to explain their dire predicament.
Hegan understood the gravity of their situation, but felt that he was not qualified to deal with it himself, so he referred them to one of his superiors, Father Cooke.
It would be Cooke who would contact the most experienced demonologists he knew of – the now legendary husband and wife team of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were also part of the Amityville Horror investigation – and put them on the case.
The Warrens wasted no time in contacting the group and upon interviewing the three witnesses, Ed Warren (a devout Catholic as well as paranormal investigator) seemed astounded that these young adults were so quick to trust the words of the ghost as spoken through the medium. Ed Warren summed up the situation thusly during his interview with Donna, Angie and Lou:
”To begin with, there is no Annabelle!
There never was.
You were duped.
However, we are dealing with a spirit here.
The teleportation of the doll while you were out of the apartment, the appearance of notes written on parchment, the manifestation of three symbolic drops of blood, plus the gestures the doll made are all meaningful.
They tell me there was intent, which means there was an intelligence behind the activity.
But ghosts, human spirits, plain and simply can’t bring on phenomena of this nature and intensity.
They don’t have the power.”
At about this point Lou interjected:
“It’s a damn voodoo doll, that’s what it is… I told them about that thing a long time ago.
The doll was just taking advantage of them.”
Nevertheless, Donna defended the position that she and Angie had previously assumed in protecting Annabelle:
“It was the spirit of Annabelle we cared about!
How were we to know anything?
But looking back on it now, maybe we shouldn’t have given the doll so much credence.
But really, we saw the thing as being no more than a harmless mascot.
It never hurt anything… at least until the other day.”
After completing the interview, inspecting the rag doll, checking Lou’s wounds and confirming that none of the eyewitnesses ever saw the specter of the child in the apartment, the Warrens came to the startling conclusion that it was not a ghost that they were dealing with, but an actual demon.
Even more chillingly, the Warrens postulated that the doll itself was not actually possessed by an evil entity, but that the doll was a conduit between the earthly realm and hell itself.
They also affirmed that the medium had been manipulated in order to gain the trust of the people in the apartment, leading to what they called an “infestation” of the home.
The Warrens further claimed that the “inhuman demonic spirit,“ had preyed upon the nursing students’ intrinsic compassion by pretending it was a lost child.
According to Ed Warren:
“…what has happened is something inhuman has taken over here.
Demonic.
Ordinarily people aren’t bothered by inhuman demonic spirits, unless they do something to bring the force into their lives.
Your first mistake was to give the doll recognition, that is the reason why the spirit moved into the doll to draw attention to itself.
Once it had your attention, it exploited you, it simply brought you fear and even injury.
Inhuman spirits, enjoy inflicting pain, it’s negative.
Your next mistake was calling in a medium, The demonic has to somehow get your permission to interfere in your life.
Unfortunately, through your own free will, you gave it that permission.”
Adding to the shock that the three friends were no doubt experiencing at that moment, the Warrens went on to insist that following Lou’s attack, the demon’s next movie would be to exit Annabelle and enter one them for the purpose of “complete human possession” followed, almost inevitably, by murder.
According to Ed Warren:
“Spirits don’t possess things, spirits possess people.
Instead, the spirits simply moved the doll around and gave it the illusion of being alive.
Now, what happened to Lou earlier this week was bound to occur sooner or later.
In fact, you all were in jeopardy of coming under possession by this spirit, this is what the thing was really after.
But Lou didn’t believe in the charade, so he was an ongoing threat to the entity.
There was bound to be a showdown.
Had the spirit been given another week or two, you might have been killed.”
This, according to the Warrens, left student nurses with just one recourse…
The Rite of Exorcism
The Warrens then decided that the best course of action would be to invoke the power of an exorcism blessing to banish the malevolent monstrosity from the doll.
They contacted an Episcopal priest named Father Cooke who was at first reluctant to get involved with this case, but eventually yielded after the Warrens explained just how dire the situation had become.
Ed Warren explained how the Episcopalian blessing differed from the more famous Catholic rite of exorcism:
“The Episcopal blessing of the home is a wordy, seven page document that is distinctly positive in nature.
Rather than specifically expelling evil entities from the dwelling, the emphasis is instead directed toward filling the home with the power of the positive and of God.”
Unlike most cinematic versions of an exorcism, the ritual occurred without much commotion from the demonic doll.
Following the sacred ceremony, Father Cooke extended the blessing to Donna, Angie, Lou and the Warrens, then (in what I hope was his best Zelda Rubenstein voice) declared that the demon was no longer going to be able to harm them…
The Warrens weren’t so sure.
The Aftermath
Following Father Cooke’s exorcism, Ed and Lorraine – still doubtful that the demon had actually been banished from the potentially homicidal Annabelle – suggested they remove the doll from the home.
Donna, eager to be rid of the nightmarish entity, readily consented to their request.
Ed then cautiously picked up the hateful doll and handed it to Lorraine, whereupon Father Cooke (who was evidently not completely convinced of the exorcism’s effectiveness either) warned Ed not to drive home on the interstate, lest the inhuman entity managed to linger within the doll and tried to influence the car.
Lorraine then placed the doll into the backseat of his car, buckled up, Ed started the engine and – in what must have been one of the most stressful late night drives in human history – they began their lengthy journey home.
Ed took the priest’s advice and stuck to the winding back roads, where few other drivers would be jeopardized by their diabolical passenger… it would turn out to be a wise decision.
According to the Warrens, whenever they approached a sharp curve, their vehicle would inevitably stall, causing the brakes and power steering to fail simultaneously and sending them perilously close to driving off the road.
They also had more than one near collision with a passing car.
Finally Ed had had enough and he reached into his black bag, removed a vile of holy water and doused the rag doll with the sign of the cross.
The doll would behave normally for the rest of the ride.
Once home, Ed (inexplicably) placed the doll into a chair adjacent to his desk.
He reported that the doll levitated on more than one occasion, then seemed to fall in an lifeless state.
This hiatus lasted only a few weeks and before long, Annabelle was up to her old tricks.
The Warrens claimed that they had locked Annabelle in the outer office building before setting out on a trip, but when they returned home and opened the front door they discovered that the doll was facing them, perched contentedly on Ed’s easy chair, as if mocking their efforts to contain it.
The doll would also, much like in her previous home, randomly appear in different rooms of the house, startling the Warrens.
Finally the Warrens had enough of Annabelle’s unnatural antics and they decided to bring in the big guns; a Catholic priest and exorcist by the name of Father Jason Bradford.
By all accounts, Father Bradford did not take to kindly to being called in to deal with this alleged “devil doll.”
According to reports of the encounter, Father Bradford brashly approached the then inert doll and ripped it up from its seat, screaming: “Your just a rag doll Annabelle, you can’t hurt anyone!”
At which point he threw the doll back down on the chair.
Ed blanched at his vitriolic demeanor and stated: “That’s one thing you better not say.”
Lorraine was also disturbed by Father Bradford’s dismissive behavior and begged the priest to be careful while driving and to call her when he got back to the rectory.
The call did not come until late in the evening when the shaken priest told Lorraine that his brakes had given out just as he had approached a hectic intersection. His car was demolished and he and the others involved barely survived the accident.
It was then that the Warrens decided that Annabelle was simply too dangerous to be exposed to the world, so they had a specially sealed case built for the doll – a sort of glass coffin – plastered with a sign which read: “WARNING, POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN.”
The case, which the demon doll inhabits to this day, was placed in a room full of supposedly cursed objects that the Warrens had taken out of circulation and the door was locked.
Eventually, the Warrens turned their terrifying collection into an “Occult Museum,” which is open to the public.
The now incarcerated Annabelle seems to be unable to move, but that does not mean that her nefarious powers have diminished.
Arguably the most disturbing tale associated with this malicious rag doll involves a young couple who were touring the museum with Ed as a guide.
After Ed had explained the background story of Annabelle, the young man – full of the hubris of youth and no doubt trying to impress his innamorata – pounded on the glass case and challenged the doll to rise up and scratch him.
Ed wasted no time escorting the couple out of the museum stating: “son you need to leave.”
Ed watched as the couple drove off on the young beau’s motorcycle and was, sadly, one of the last people to ever seem him alive.
According to his girlfriend, just after they left the museum, they were laughing about the silly stories surrounding the doll when the man abruptly lost control of his motorcycle and crashed into a tree.
He was killed instantly and his girlfriend required over a year of hospitalization.
While many skeptics would insist that this was nothing more than a sorrowful coincidence, the Warrens were convinced that they had incurred the wrath of Annabelle.
Ed Warren passed away in 2006, and Lorraine, now in her eighties, remains a thoroughly dedicated paranormal investigator.
She claims that while Annabelle has not been able to break out from her case, she still manages to shift positions and, on occasion, has even been known to growl at unwary and no doubt terrified visitors.
Conclusion
There’s so much to consider in terms of the legitimacy of this case…
Are we talking about genuine demonic possession or diabolical manipulation?
A misunderstood haunting?
A bizarre series of events embellished by media darling demonologists?
Or one of the most elaborate paranormal hoaxes ever pulled off; resulting in a legend of a possessed doll so terrifying that it makes Chucky from “Child’s Play” look like a Cabbage Patch kid?
The truth, such as it is, remains buried in the memories of just a handful of individuals and is likely never to see the light of day.
And while I remain skeptical about this (and most) possession cases, I feel obliged to admit that if I am ever invited to peruse the shelves of the Warren’s Occult Museum and come face to face with Annabelle.
I will graciosly offer said invitee the chance to “piss off.”
Because no matter how rational I may be sitting in front of this keyboard with the sunlight pouring over my shoulders and a cold brew mere inches from my hand, in my heart of hearts I know that dolls are pure, unrefined, one-hundred percent evil… and no once can convince me otherwise.
And, putting all rationality aside, I shudder to think that the Warrens actually were right and Annabelle (or whatever is inside if her) might just be biding her time, waiting for her caretaker to expire, so that it can be unleashed by less responsible hands onto an unsuspecting world…
In the meantime, I might never go into a toy store again.
invisible
On Holiday
- MBTI
- none
What a strange trend! I don't think I have ever noticed a trend like that in my part of the world.
In what kinds of ways do you make your home invisible to entities?
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
I think it’s supposed to be rustic and stuff…
I would say one out of every 20 or so homes here has one or two on it.
As for myself, I have my own melange of rituals that I do, this includes praying, smudging, using blessed holy items (over my doorways).
But mainly it is reaching a state of mind while doing all this where I feel I gain a “hold” of reality around me, I focus my energies on making my house “literally” invisible to negative entities…as in, they just won’t be able to see my house - that is my intention anyhow.
If they should happen to get close to my house I have put “spells” I guess you could call them to keep them out…the last thing that came in my house set off so many alarms in my head that it induced that out of body experience where I used my Qi to push it out…that was the same night my Son heard me yelling though when he got up all was quiet, then he saw an orb of light pass the doorway…this was without prompting from me about my experience that night and he always rolls his eyes when I put on any paranormal shows, so if he saw it, I believe him.
There are so many objects in my house that would make it repulsive to a negative entity…and the few items I have that could attract such things have never been used and remain out of sight and covered.
Smudging should be done at very least once a week IMO…as you do it you verbally explain your intentions - “No negative entities my enter or see this house, the house and it’s occupants are protected from anything negative or negative influences, this house and the occupants are invisible unless your intentions are good and pure.” or something along those lines.
I haven’t had so much trouble that I feel I need to go put salt around the border or the house, but it is an option…it kind of depends on what you are dealing with as to what you are going to use to keep it away.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
I have to say…I truly miss rock climbing, I used to be such an avid climber…now all my gear sits in a box in the garage (arthritis!!!!), it was such a powerful experience of overcoming one’s fears but also being fully present for that time you were climbing - it was forced presence.
I miss that…that and spelunking…wow, talk about being one with the earth…when you have your bag tied to your ankle and you are squeezing between to flat (or very fucking sharp) boulders with a whole mountain bearing down upon it…exhale…scoot forward…take breath or two…exhale (to make yourself smaller) and squeeze a few more feet, until finally you reach a huge room with stalactites and stalagmites and waterfalls and it’s something very few will ever see with their own eyes, and you feel very in tune with it all.
Both those activities were relaxing to me in a way nothing else was.
Can a scientist in an eggplant-colored blazer wielding cartoons of spiders instill fear in me?
Yes, he can.
Kevin LaBar is part evil genius, part Wizard of Oz.
He creates sinister worlds that make your heart race, palms sweat, stomach clench–and then he cures you.
He is, you might say, Dr. Fear.
LaBar is a professor at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, where he and others conduct twisted experiments using a nine-foot-square Rubik’s Cube of an alternate universe.
Known as the DIVE (for Duke Immersive Virtual Environment), it is one of only a handful of similar rooms deployed in academic institutions worldwide. Designed to be used with six stereoscopic projectors and real-time head and hand tracking, this is where archeologists explore 3-D representations of Roman ruins and molecular biologists manipulate double helixes and histones.
It’s not zero gravity, but it almost feels like it could be.
The DIVE is also where a colleague of LaBar’s has created something they call the Kitchen from Hell, designed to measure stress tolerance by subjecting its victims–usually unsuspecting psych majors–to an onslaught of minor miseries, from a teakettle that won’t turn off to honking cars, barking dogs, a loud ticking clock, and a “failure task”: find your lost keys as soon as possible.
Only (heh heh) there are no keys.
LaBar has been inflicting everything from predators to math tests on volunteers for several years as a way to understand fear–how we acquire it, how we recover from it, and whether there’s any way to speed up the process of conquering it so that we can go back to enjoying our one precious picnic of a life.
I wanted to better understand fear in the context of outdoor sports and adventure, because it is both a lock and a key.
Fear can prevent us from doing the things we love and from loving the things we do, but it can also, if we’re lucky, help us access peak emotional experiences.
As scientists are confirming, adventure seeking isn’t just about skill, planning, and the right group of buddies.
It’s also about a Milk Dud—size piece of our brains–the amygdala–and how to get a grip on it.
Because of my interest in earthly terrors, LaBar plans to attack me with snakes and spiders.
The glitch, however, is that I’m not generally very frightened of snakes and spiders, especially fake ones, and neither are a lot of LaBar’s volunteers. (Genuine phobias of any sort occur in only about 8 percent of people.)
So, to make the animations more fearsome, LaBar has added voltage to the mix: now the little monsters appear with real bite, in the form of a shock delivered to my left wrist.
Before I enter the DIVE, Matt Fecteau, the lab manager and resident techie, attaches probes to my arm.
Wires connect me to a white box with dials and meters.
“Do you feel it now?
How about now?”
Matt cranks up the dial.
It’s been a while since they used this instrument of torture in a study, and it was usually operated by a postdoc who has since moved to Sweden.
I can’t help but picture Westley inside the medieval life-sucking machine in the movie The Princess Bride.
It’s supposed to be uncomfortable but not searing.
I feel an unpleasant zing.
We take it up to just over 40 volts (for perspective, good electric lawn mowers are 40 volts), delivered with a constant amperage.
“The amperage is the thing,” says Fecteau, fiddling. “You don’t want to get too high or it’s deadly.”
There’s more fiddling and Fecteau is moving some wires around when I feel a big zing–quite a big zing–and I yelp a bit.
Everyone looks at me.
“That must have been electrical interference,” someone says.
Then it happens again.
More yelping.
This is the pain zone. “We better move the machine away from the computer wires.”
If I was feeling calm and confident about spiderland, now I’m not.
When Fecteau hooks me up to palm sensors that monitor my skin conductance–a fancy term for sweating–I’m already halfway up the stress graph.
I am, as LaBar puts it, nicely pre-stressed.
The DIVE is eerily quiet.
The booth works like a 3-D movie: the action is projected onto the walls, and you wear glasses to get the full effect.
I strap on a techno tiara that resembles scuba goggles but with built-in gyroscope, magnetic compass, and gravity sensor to track my head in space.
I am seated like Miss Muffet, waiting for the show to begin.
The ground starts moving, and I’m floating through a forest as if on a hoverboard.
Above me are sky and tree canopy.
If I move my head, my new world moves with me.
The technology is pretty amazing.
Sometimes the animation slows.
A spider the size of a coffee mug skitters across the top of a boulder or climbs a log next to my leg.
It has unnaturally long, jagged legs and moves to the unnerving sound of ticking.
Each time, it vanishes after a few seconds.
Sometimes a coiled snake the size of a Frisbee appears and opens its jaws to bite me.
It’s brown and plump and appears to a soundtrack of rattles.
That’s when a small jolt hits my wrist; it’s barely noticeable, but I keep expecting it to be worse.
I feel the uneasy buildup of anticipation.
I’m wondering if I can just return to the Kitchen from Hell.
This goes on for about seven or eight minutes, then the shocks stop while the images continue.
The pain doesn’t return, and soon it’s over.
There’s some debate about whether we are born with primal fears of snakes or we learn them.
Research last year by primatologist Lynne Isbell at the University of California at Davis found that Japanese macaque monkeys are born with specific nerve cells in the brain that respond to snakes.
This suggests that at one time serpents were dangerous enough to our ancestors to drive heritable changes in brain physiology.
Certainly, our brains are hardwired for fear.
The old adage that horses and dogs can smell it is not only true but may apply to humans, too; research subjects who smell the sweat of scared people enter a hyperalert state themselves.
Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in the earliest forms of life on earth and predating the drive to reproduce.
It’s even possible that fear is the basis of the full spectrum of human emotions, as we evolved ways to calm ourselves from our well-honed anxieties.
The main reason we remember anything, scientists posit, is that we must remember fear.
Emotional events, but especially fearful ones, release calcium in the brain, which in turn encodes information.
Thanks to fear, we have Proust.
Fear protects us–it kept our ancestors vigilant and helped them detect and avoid physical threats.
But fear can also hijack us, keeping us from performing at our peak.
The so-called fight, flight, or freeze response was useful in the Pleistocene but is less so today, when our fears involve things like surfing Maverick’s for fun or giving public speeches.
Now we deal with stress and anxiety more than outright predator terrors, but physiologically speaking stress resembles fear, with the same rise in sweat and blood pressure and release of combat-ready hormones.
Our brains treat all fears–from cheese phobias (yes, people have those) to standing at the top of an icy ski chute–the same way on a crude continuum. Technically, the term anxiety refers to an expectation of harm, while fear is what happens in the moment.
In the deepest clutches of fear (Gorgonzola!), our primitive brain stem overrides our problem-solving neocortex, and we become stupid.
Our fine motor skills deteriorate, and our field of vision narrows.
Sports psychologists know that fear can choke us, distract us, and impair our judgment.
If you’ve ever tried to talk someone (or yourself) down from a cliff, or experienced sewing-machine leg on a narrow ledge, or moved in slow motion from a hazard when you should have been on fast-forward, you know that fear doesn’t always save your ass.
Sometimes it dishes it up on a platter.
Fear serves two main purposes: it’s supposed to jack you up with enough adrenaline to fight a threat, and to etch the experience into your brain so you know to avoid that threat in the future.
Sometimes it flubs the first task, but it does the second one particularly well.
Extreme fear can haunt us for decades.
About 70 to 80 percent of us will experience it at least once in our lifetime–as a result of a serious accident or crime, watching someone die a terrible death, or a roadside bomb or natural disaster–and more if we pursue high-risk work or play.
About 8 percent will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, essentially a very bad fear hangover.
It’s estimated that about 17 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered post-traumatic stress.
And there’s some evidence that seasoned mountain climbers and other elite adventurers are less likely to develop it. (They still do, however; check out the latest edition of mountaineer Joe Simpson’s classic Touching the Void, in which he catalogs his lasting panic attacks and weeping fits.)
Some people’s brains are genetically, preternaturally stress resilient, and these are often the types drawn to adventure sports.
Conrad Anker has witnessed avalanches, carried friends’ lifeless bodies, and suffered extreme physical deprivation.
Yet the mountains continue to call him.
“I do go back for more,” says Anker, 51. “I’m less afraid than I used to be. Chalk it up to experience and the way that I’m wired. I’m not normal.”
Brains like Anker’s appear to process fear in a less intense way, and they recover from it quickly.
But for many others, PTSD can cause debilitating long-term mood swings, twitchy nerves, nightmares, flashbacks, aggression, depression, substance abuse, and suicide.
“We need to understand how memory works in healthy brains to understand how it might be altered in these disorders,” LaBar explains.
“We’re trying to come up with better training regimens that help people reach their goals and transfer those goals across many environments.”
Even healthy brains show a wide range of fear responses.
Women tend to suffer more from anxiety and may be more likely to develop PTSD, but scientists aren’t sure why; it could also be that men are conditioned to hide it.
Most people, unlike Anker, appear to grow more fearful of certain activities as they age.
Both men and women produce less courage-boosting testosterone as they get older and their skills and reflexes decline.
Regardless, fear is not a fixed response, says LaBar.
We can learn to get a grip.
Back in the laboratory, I step out of the holo-deck of vipers and view my skin-conductance graph.
It looks like Nevada: basins and ranges. “You’re a good subject. You scare well,” says LaBar, who grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and prefers the gym to the outdoors, which could help explain his fondness for technology as a window into the soul.
“You showed response to both spiders and snakes, but you showed a bigger response to the snake when it was paired with the shock.” LaBar points to a steep rise in the graph. “The shocks started here, and it really spiked higher. The double bumps go away when the shocks went away. Classic.”
LaBar assures me that by showing me snakes with no shocks toward the end of the 3-D session, my brain learned to dismiss the threat.
This recovery is called fear extinction or exposure therapy.
It’s the basis for the most effective methods for treating fear disorders like phobias: show the phobic friendly snakes until they feel comfortable, even ready to hold them.
The idea is that you essentially create new, better memories that outcompete the frightful ones.
What’s so great about virtual reality, says LaBar, is that you can show any kind of fear trigger in any context.
Snakes in the woods.
Snakes in the office.
Snakes in bed. (Wait, that was Freud.)
LaBar’s studies show that extinction therapy is more effective when carried out in these diverse settings.
The keep-on-doing-it-safely strategy can also work outside the shrink’s office.
It’s how most of us learn to push ourselves in risky sports, a little bit at a time, gradually gaining skills and confidence.
Taken to an extreme, you get Jeb Corliss, the videogenic BASE jumper whose recent stunts include flying 123 miles per hour in a wingsuit between two canyon walls spaced just 25 feet apart.
Unexpectedly, Corliss claims he used to be a fraidycat.
“I’ve spent my whole life confronting fear,” says Corliss, who’s 38. “I’ve been obsessed with it since childhood. When things terrified me, I was compelled to confront them. I was afraid of snakes, so I started catching snakes–first garter snakes, then bigger snakes, then finally rattlesnakes. Then I became obsessed with sharks, so I started diving. I didn’t want these fears to have power and control over me."
Then, in South Africa in 2012, Corliss jumped off a ledge, misread a target, and slammed into a granite wall at 120 mph.
He broke his left fibula and both ankles, ripped his ACL, cut open his body, and went into kidney failure.
After a few days in the hospital, a psychologist came to see him about PTSD.
“She was like, ‘Wow, you’re doing fine. This has not affected you in the slightest,’ ” Corliss says.
A few months and skin grafts later, he was back in the suit.
OK, Corliss is a bit of an outlier.
Most of us have bigger struggles after a bad accident.
Unfortunately, exposure methods don’t always work, especially for violent or complex fears.
The brain is a three-pound organ of survival.
It doesn’t necessarily want you to feel comfortable doing dangerous things.
It wants you to go home and bake baklava.
“Even with regular extinction therapy, you can get the return of fear,” says Marie Monfils, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
This is because the original trauma memory is still rooted in your hippocampus, ready to bark at your amygdala alongside the new memories of better times on the battlefield or in the tube.
This has been the experience for big-wave champion Greg Long, who almost died while surfing a three-story wave off Southern California’s Cortes Bank in 2012.
Long was battered by the break and forced down under three massive waves until he lost consciousness near the surface.
A jet skier finally pulled him out.
Returning to sea wasn’t easy. “I went back out less than a month later,” says Long, 31. “It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. There was instant fear and panic, the thought that I don’t want to be here. It’s still hard. Overcoming those fears is about getting beyond emotions and respecting the process. Sometimes those emotions are there, sometimes not. I like to think it’s easier the more I do it, but I’m going to carry them with me forever.”
As Long is finding out, the anticipation of a threat can be as bad as the threat itself.
As he and LaBar describe it, memory is glued to emotion in things we’re supposed to remember.
That’s why fear memories make our palms sweat.
So the main idea in any number of fear-mastery techniques is to peel away the memory from the emotion.
To get all Zen about it, it’s not the dragon that scares us, it’s our response to the dragon.
The trick, then, is to tame ourselves.
Our dragons first travel to the brain through a sensory pathway, such as the optic thalamus, LaBar explains.
Within 100 milliseconds, before our conscious brain even knows it, the threat signal rushes to the amygdala, the small but powerful emotional core.
It’s the amygdala that pulls the alarm on our autonomic nervous system for a surging heartbeat, the result of which is rapid breathing, buckling bowels, that cold sensation as your blood leaves your surface layers to travel to muscle, and so on.
By now the information has traveled back up to our neocortex via neurotransmitters like cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine.
If the amygdala is our inner hysterical hausfrau, the highly evolved neocortex is our let’s-be-reasonable-here negotiator.
Between them something of a power struggle ensues.
In some people, the amygdala tends to stay in charge, while in others, quick, strategic decision making takes over.
Part of this tendency is inherited, but it’s also subject to manipulation through training, willpower, and a nice dose of Xanax or propranolol, a beta-blocker that prevents adrenaline from binding to cell receptors.
Propranolol is also known as the stage-fright drug; an opera singer once thoughtfully smuggled me a dose before my first book talk.
By lowering your heart rate, it literally makes you calm, cool, and collected.
Regrettably, it does not turn you into Winston Churchill.
In a perfect world, we would all react optimally to fear, use it to assess risk, calculate our best options, and return rapidly to baseline.
When ski guide Allen O’Bannon, coauthor of the classic Allen & Mike’s Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book, stepped onto a patch of rotten snow while ice climbing in the Wind River Range in 1995, he found himself falling 300 feet.
Time slowed.
An image came to his mind from a conversation he’d had with another ice climber who’d survived a fall.
He’d told O’Bannon that he’d rolled into a ball to keep his crampons and ice ax from catching on the slope and creating a worse impact zone.
O’Bannon pulled in his arms and legs until his rope finally arrested him.
Now 50 and a risk manager for Denver-based Polar Field Services, he tells clients, mostly scientists, about the power of preparation.
In a crisis, O’Bannon explains, some people panic and some stay cool.
The vast majority, though, fall into what he calls “the bewildered state,” in which they pretty much do nothing to take charge of their situation.
“I push training in as many simulations as you can,” he says. “At what distance will you pull your bear spray? How will you react when you fall into a river? The idea is to know what failure feels like. If you can’t train, visualize. Then your response becomes automatic.”
When Greg Long was unable to breathe under the waves, he stayed calm and slowly climbed his leash line to the surface.
He’d trained for years to hold his breath past the comfort zone; he knew what it felt like.
“There was no panic, no questioning, just, This is what I’m going to do if I’m going to survive,” he says. “There were no negative thoughts or wasted energy. I was totally focused. Until we let go of our fears, we don’t begin to reach our potential capabilities.”
Sometimes fear can help provide the focus we need.
People who are comfortable on its jagged edge know how to use it to their advantage.
“Fear is energy,” says Jaimal Yogis, a surfer and author of last year’s science-steeped memoir The Fear Project.
Fear, he says, is mediated by arousal systems similar to those for sex and exercise.
That’s why it feels good to experience it in the context of a horror movie or a Class III rapid.
When our nervous systems are aroused but not in full alarm, we are paying attention.
Our senses are primed.
Our working memory increases.
We feel alive.
The flip side of fear is flow, that delicious state in which time drops away and you are fully engaged and present.
Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has studied what happens to volunteers taking timed math tests.
Most people experience math anxiety.
Their cortisol levels rise, and their misery and self-doubt actually inhibit their working memory, causing them to perform worse than they would otherwise. But an interesting thing happens to people who are confident in their math skills: the cortisol actually makes them better.
They become more focused.
Does this mean we’re doomed if we fear math or that steep tree run that makes our knees shake?
No, says Beilick. Because we can learn to tune out the negative thought stream–paralysis by analysis–that drains precious cognitive juice.
This overthinking is the classic choke pathway known all too well by professional athletes.
“You’re not born a choker,” she says.
In other words, you can go from being someone who is hamstrung by fear to someone who is impelled by it.
But it takes some work, says Beilock. “People can train themselves out. You can sing a song, distract yourself in the moment. Think about the outcome you want rather than your knees. Have a one-word mantra.”
Canadian slopestyle skier Kaya Turski says that if she can get a grip, anyone can.
“I am a high-anxiety person, one of the most nervous athletes,” says the 26-year-old X Games gold medalist.
“I tend to overthink things. Going into these events, I generally feel like the world is on the line.”
After Turski ripped her third ACL on a switch 720 just six months before the Sochi Olympics, she knew the recovery would be as much mental as physical.
Because of her anxieties, she’d already started working with Los Angeles sports psychologist Michael Gervais, who helped Felix Baumgartner overcome his panic attacks before dropping like a rock from space in 2012, free-falling 24 miles and breaking the sound barrier.
The crux of their work has been mindfulness training.
“I meditate every day,” says Turski. “As soon as your mind wanders, that’s when you introduce fear. It’s as simple as tuning back into the now. I haven’t perfected this, but it has 100 percent changed my life.”
The work was central to her comeback.
It helped her take her eighth gold in worldwide X Games, but it couldn’t keep her from catching a bad cold and falling–twice–in Sochi.
She placed 19th.
“That experience shook me more than anything had ever shaken me,” Turski says. “It was a reality check. Things don’t always go your way. So I got back on the meditation track. Life isn’t so bad. You have to emerge into the light. Here I learned that I could survive something.”
Few seem to have mastered fear so completely as Alex Honnold and Dean Potter, both of whom do unimaginably terrifying things hundreds of feet off the ground without a safety net.
“I wouldn’t say I don’t get afraid,” says Honnold, 29, who is known for his free-solo ascents of big walls.
“It’s just that I’m more rational about it. If you’re fully in control of the variables, you shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of. Walking on a handrail or beam, if you know you can do it, it shouldn’t really matter how big the drop is.”
But that attitude has taken time to cultivate. “I think mastery of fear is a skill,” he says. “It may be partly that I’m more skilled at soloing. I’m less nervous about a lot of things now. In general I’m more relaxed.”
Dean Potter’s mother was a yoga teacher.
That awareness of stillness came in handy in 2012, when the 42-year-old wingsuit jumper highlined a mile-high, 130-foot span across China’s Enshi Grand Canyonwith zero protection.
“I’m not so good at sitting on the floor and meditating,” says Potter. “I use those skills way better when I’m moving. Any time I’m having difficulty, I focus on the breath, on relaxed breathing. If I have a combination of calm and fear, I access mental states way beyond normal consciousness. That’s why I choose to do scary things.”
Whatever Honnold and Potter have, the military would like to bottle it, and so would a lot of coaches.
Although Marines might prefer a pill to the lotus position, the data on meditation’s ability to calm the nervous system is impressive, says Martin Paulus, director of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Laureate Institute for Brain Research.
Marine training already includes four-count “combat breathing” during stress.
The Naval Health Research Center, along with the Office of Naval Research, recently conducted a study in which infantry Marines learned other tricks for hacking their fear systems, including “nonjudgmentally paying attention” to passing thoughts and feelings.
In brain scans, Marines who received the eight-week training showed less activation in the anterior cingulate, a midbrain region that processes emotions, and in the insula, which trafficks in physical sensations.
Paulus, who was on the team for the study, says that these regions work to dampen the amygdala so the more rational cortex can step in.
This study and others also show that mindfulness can help people recover from fear by making their brains more resilient.
After the course, called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, these brain regions in the Marines seemed to gain efficiency, and they more closely resembled those of Navy SEALs and elite athletes.
When researchers deliberately stressed Marines by restricting their breathing and showing them pictures of angry faces, the meditators returned more quickly to lower heart rates, and their brains released less neuropeptide Y, a transmitter associated with stress.
The military is also experimenting with virtual reality at Buckley Air Force Base, outside Denver, to prep its troops for deployment.
The idea is to expose National Guard members to the experience of seeing and handling human remains, and of witnessing violence and death, while teaching them techniques to deal with the stress.
These include mindfulness, but also reframing the events in less fearful ways.
Sometimes just talking or writing about fear reduces its power, says Matt Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA.
His lab looked at volunteers who were desperately afraid of spiders and had them go through exposure therapy (with real arthropods this time).
Researchers told half the group to speak about how terrified they were.
Lieberman calls this process labeling.
Unexpectedly, these were the most successful patients, the ones “who could eventually put their hand in the cage and rub spiders with Q-tips,” says Lieberman. “We think labeling turns on the system that regulates brain learning in a long-term way that doesn’t have to activate the amygdala,” he says.
In other words, articulating their fears out loud activated a different part of the brain, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that detours the fear from the brain stem.
These subjects were better able to keep their wits about them, literally, since wits exist far outside the amygdala.
LaBar and others are also trying to help the cortex override the amygdala, which has implications for the treatment of PTSD.
Recall that during exposure therapy, two memories are competing for dominance: the trauma memory and the safety memory.
If you can literally reach out and poke neurons in certain parts of the cortex–for example, the ventral medial zone, associated with emotional regulation–then you can help the safety memory win the wrestling match.
Based on rat studies, one way to do this is with deep-brain electrodes or transcranial magnetic stimulation, already used occasionally to treat severe depression.
This is a lot of work to suppress a bad memory, but someday soon scientists envision shortcuts, through the help of drugs, technology, specially timed therapy, or a combination of approaches.
Because wouldn’t it be better to just wipe out that bad memory–or replace it altogether?
The idea that we can master our fears is alluring.
It’s one of Hollywood’s favorite plot devices, and it represents the ultimate Cartesian transcendence of reason over biology.
But as scientists are increasingly learning, the mind, and not just the brain, is biological.
Memories themselves are patched into neurons by calcium and proteins, and the whole process is mediated by a neurotransmitter called glutamate.
The memories exist in specific places in our hippocampus, like books in a library, from which they can be retrieved. Scientists had assumed that those static memories would be there forever, even if dementia meant that we couldn’t always access them.
But recent research suggests that each time you check out those memories, they have the potential to be updated or changed.
According to the University of Texas’s Monfils, the act of retrieval seems to engage new proteins and chemical reactions, to the point that the memory itself becomes briefly destabilized.
She studies this effect in rats that, like I was, were fear-conditioned to a cue (in their case, a tone instead of a spider) with an electroshock.
If you expose the rats to a harmless tone up to six hours after they were last scared, the memory loses its attachment to fear.
Wait longer than six hours and it solidifies into concrete.
Monfils believes that if you time standard exposure therapy to this window of rewriting, you can “reconsolidate” the memory in a helpful way.
“We can update the memory and prevent the return of fear,” she says.
This holds promise for humans with PTSD, as do drug interventions using beta-blockers during memory reconsolidation.
But these are early days. “It would be irresponsible to suggest that these are real techniques. It’s definitely science fiction right now,” says Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscience professor at New York University, who has collaborated with Monfils.
It’s hard not to think about this without imagining yourself on the set of Total Recall or The Bourne Identity, because the implications are profound and definitely a little creepy.
Without your original memories, are you still you?
Are we willing to sacrifice a little selfhood at the altar of better performance or national security?
After all, we’d be much better killing machines if we didn’t remember we killed.
Personally, I’m not ready for the loss of fear.
I like the sweet spot of fear and courage.
That’s where mountains get scaled and rivers descended and the heroes still come home.
Most of all, it’s where the greatest acts of creativity occur–and, with them, stories about fear and courage.
In the act of telling and the act of listening, we celebrate the melding of our old and new brains, which is, after all, where we become human.
Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.
I miss that…that and spelunking…wow, talk about being one with the earth…when you have your bag tied to your ankle and you are squeezing between to flat (or very fucking sharp) boulders with a whole mountain bearing down upon it…exhale…scoot forward…take breath or two…exhale (to make yourself smaller) and squeeze a few more feet, until finally you reach a huge room with stalactites and stalagmites and waterfalls and it’s something very few will ever see with their own eyes, and you feel very in tune with it all.
Both those activities were relaxing to me in a way nothing else was.
The Science of Conquering Your Greatest Fears
It may be the oldest emotion.
Before happiness, before sorrow, before exhilaration,
and way, way before the urge to climb mountains and bomb down steeps, there was fear.
Now scientists are finding new ways to help us conquer our deepest anxieties–
and use them to perform even better.
By: Florence Williams
Oct 2, 2014
"You're not born a choker," says neuroscientist Sian Beilock. We can learn to tune out negative thoughts.
Many things scare me: the huge rock at the bottom of Boulder Garden on Colorado’s Gunnison River that has flipped my kayak numerous times; the chutes off the stormy top of the Big Sky tram; sullen men with clubs who lurk in Kenya’s Ngong Hills (I met them a while back).It may be the oldest emotion.
Before happiness, before sorrow, before exhilaration,
and way, way before the urge to climb mountains and bomb down steeps, there was fear.
Now scientists are finding new ways to help us conquer our deepest anxieties–
and use them to perform even better.
By: Florence Williams
Oct 2, 2014
"You're not born a choker," says neuroscientist Sian Beilock. We can learn to tune out negative thoughts.
Can a scientist in an eggplant-colored blazer wielding cartoons of spiders instill fear in me?
Yes, he can.
Kevin LaBar is part evil genius, part Wizard of Oz.
He creates sinister worlds that make your heart race, palms sweat, stomach clench–and then he cures you.
He is, you might say, Dr. Fear.
LaBar is a professor at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, where he and others conduct twisted experiments using a nine-foot-square Rubik’s Cube of an alternate universe.
Known as the DIVE (for Duke Immersive Virtual Environment), it is one of only a handful of similar rooms deployed in academic institutions worldwide. Designed to be used with six stereoscopic projectors and real-time head and hand tracking, this is where archeologists explore 3-D representations of Roman ruins and molecular biologists manipulate double helixes and histones.
It’s not zero gravity, but it almost feels like it could be.
The DIVE is also where a colleague of LaBar’s has created something they call the Kitchen from Hell, designed to measure stress tolerance by subjecting its victims–usually unsuspecting psych majors–to an onslaught of minor miseries, from a teakettle that won’t turn off to honking cars, barking dogs, a loud ticking clock, and a “failure task”: find your lost keys as soon as possible.
Only (heh heh) there are no keys.
LaBar has been inflicting everything from predators to math tests on volunteers for several years as a way to understand fear–how we acquire it, how we recover from it, and whether there’s any way to speed up the process of conquering it so that we can go back to enjoying our one precious picnic of a life.
I wanted to better understand fear in the context of outdoor sports and adventure, because it is both a lock and a key.
Fear can prevent us from doing the things we love and from loving the things we do, but it can also, if we’re lucky, help us access peak emotional experiences.
As scientists are confirming, adventure seeking isn’t just about skill, planning, and the right group of buddies.
It’s also about a Milk Dud—size piece of our brains–the amygdala–and how to get a grip on it.
Because of my interest in earthly terrors, LaBar plans to attack me with snakes and spiders.
The glitch, however, is that I’m not generally very frightened of snakes and spiders, especially fake ones, and neither are a lot of LaBar’s volunteers. (Genuine phobias of any sort occur in only about 8 percent of people.)
So, to make the animations more fearsome, LaBar has added voltage to the mix: now the little monsters appear with real bite, in the form of a shock delivered to my left wrist.
Before I enter the DIVE, Matt Fecteau, the lab manager and resident techie, attaches probes to my arm.
Wires connect me to a white box with dials and meters.
“Do you feel it now?
How about now?”
Matt cranks up the dial.
It’s been a while since they used this instrument of torture in a study, and it was usually operated by a postdoc who has since moved to Sweden.
I can’t help but picture Westley inside the medieval life-sucking machine in the movie The Princess Bride.
It’s supposed to be uncomfortable but not searing.
I feel an unpleasant zing.
We take it up to just over 40 volts (for perspective, good electric lawn mowers are 40 volts), delivered with a constant amperage.
“The amperage is the thing,” says Fecteau, fiddling. “You don’t want to get too high or it’s deadly.”
There’s more fiddling and Fecteau is moving some wires around when I feel a big zing–quite a big zing–and I yelp a bit.
Everyone looks at me.
“That must have been electrical interference,” someone says.
Then it happens again.
More yelping.
This is the pain zone. “We better move the machine away from the computer wires.”
If I was feeling calm and confident about spiderland, now I’m not.
When Fecteau hooks me up to palm sensors that monitor my skin conductance–a fancy term for sweating–I’m already halfway up the stress graph.
I am, as LaBar puts it, nicely pre-stressed.
The DIVE is eerily quiet.
The booth works like a 3-D movie: the action is projected onto the walls, and you wear glasses to get the full effect.
I strap on a techno tiara that resembles scuba goggles but with built-in gyroscope, magnetic compass, and gravity sensor to track my head in space.
I am seated like Miss Muffet, waiting for the show to begin.
The ground starts moving, and I’m floating through a forest as if on a hoverboard.
Above me are sky and tree canopy.
If I move my head, my new world moves with me.
The technology is pretty amazing.
Sometimes the animation slows.
A spider the size of a coffee mug skitters across the top of a boulder or climbs a log next to my leg.
It has unnaturally long, jagged legs and moves to the unnerving sound of ticking.
Each time, it vanishes after a few seconds.
Sometimes a coiled snake the size of a Frisbee appears and opens its jaws to bite me.
It’s brown and plump and appears to a soundtrack of rattles.
That’s when a small jolt hits my wrist; it’s barely noticeable, but I keep expecting it to be worse.
I feel the uneasy buildup of anticipation.
I’m wondering if I can just return to the Kitchen from Hell.
This goes on for about seven or eight minutes, then the shocks stop while the images continue.
The pain doesn’t return, and soon it’s over.
There’s some debate about whether we are born with primal fears of snakes or we learn them.
Research last year by primatologist Lynne Isbell at the University of California at Davis found that Japanese macaque monkeys are born with specific nerve cells in the brain that respond to snakes.
This suggests that at one time serpents were dangerous enough to our ancestors to drive heritable changes in brain physiology.
Certainly, our brains are hardwired for fear.
The old adage that horses and dogs can smell it is not only true but may apply to humans, too; research subjects who smell the sweat of scared people enter a hyperalert state themselves.
Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in the earliest forms of life on earth and predating the drive to reproduce.
It’s even possible that fear is the basis of the full spectrum of human emotions, as we evolved ways to calm ourselves from our well-honed anxieties.
The main reason we remember anything, scientists posit, is that we must remember fear.
Emotional events, but especially fearful ones, release calcium in the brain, which in turn encodes information.
Thanks to fear, we have Proust.
Fear protects us–it kept our ancestors vigilant and helped them detect and avoid physical threats.
But fear can also hijack us, keeping us from performing at our peak.
The so-called fight, flight, or freeze response was useful in the Pleistocene but is less so today, when our fears involve things like surfing Maverick’s for fun or giving public speeches.
Now we deal with stress and anxiety more than outright predator terrors, but physiologically speaking stress resembles fear, with the same rise in sweat and blood pressure and release of combat-ready hormones.
Our brains treat all fears–from cheese phobias (yes, people have those) to standing at the top of an icy ski chute–the same way on a crude continuum. Technically, the term anxiety refers to an expectation of harm, while fear is what happens in the moment.
In the deepest clutches of fear (Gorgonzola!), our primitive brain stem overrides our problem-solving neocortex, and we become stupid.
Our fine motor skills deteriorate, and our field of vision narrows.
Sports psychologists know that fear can choke us, distract us, and impair our judgment.
If you’ve ever tried to talk someone (or yourself) down from a cliff, or experienced sewing-machine leg on a narrow ledge, or moved in slow motion from a hazard when you should have been on fast-forward, you know that fear doesn’t always save your ass.
Sometimes it dishes it up on a platter.
Fear serves two main purposes: it’s supposed to jack you up with enough adrenaline to fight a threat, and to etch the experience into your brain so you know to avoid that threat in the future.
Sometimes it flubs the first task, but it does the second one particularly well.
Extreme fear can haunt us for decades.
About 70 to 80 percent of us will experience it at least once in our lifetime–as a result of a serious accident or crime, watching someone die a terrible death, or a roadside bomb or natural disaster–and more if we pursue high-risk work or play.
About 8 percent will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, essentially a very bad fear hangover.
It’s estimated that about 17 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered post-traumatic stress.
And there’s some evidence that seasoned mountain climbers and other elite adventurers are less likely to develop it. (They still do, however; check out the latest edition of mountaineer Joe Simpson’s classic Touching the Void, in which he catalogs his lasting panic attacks and weeping fits.)
Some people’s brains are genetically, preternaturally stress resilient, and these are often the types drawn to adventure sports.
Conrad Anker has witnessed avalanches, carried friends’ lifeless bodies, and suffered extreme physical deprivation.
Yet the mountains continue to call him.
“I do go back for more,” says Anker, 51. “I’m less afraid than I used to be. Chalk it up to experience and the way that I’m wired. I’m not normal.”
Brains like Anker’s appear to process fear in a less intense way, and they recover from it quickly.
But for many others, PTSD can cause debilitating long-term mood swings, twitchy nerves, nightmares, flashbacks, aggression, depression, substance abuse, and suicide.
“We need to understand how memory works in healthy brains to understand how it might be altered in these disorders,” LaBar explains.
“We’re trying to come up with better training regimens that help people reach their goals and transfer those goals across many environments.”
Even healthy brains show a wide range of fear responses.
Women tend to suffer more from anxiety and may be more likely to develop PTSD, but scientists aren’t sure why; it could also be that men are conditioned to hide it.
Most people, unlike Anker, appear to grow more fearful of certain activities as they age.
Both men and women produce less courage-boosting testosterone as they get older and their skills and reflexes decline.
Regardless, fear is not a fixed response, says LaBar.
We can learn to get a grip.
Back in the laboratory, I step out of the holo-deck of vipers and view my skin-conductance graph.
It looks like Nevada: basins and ranges. “You’re a good subject. You scare well,” says LaBar, who grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and prefers the gym to the outdoors, which could help explain his fondness for technology as a window into the soul.
“You showed response to both spiders and snakes, but you showed a bigger response to the snake when it was paired with the shock.” LaBar points to a steep rise in the graph. “The shocks started here, and it really spiked higher. The double bumps go away when the shocks went away. Classic.”
LaBar assures me that by showing me snakes with no shocks toward the end of the 3-D session, my brain learned to dismiss the threat.
This recovery is called fear extinction or exposure therapy.
It’s the basis for the most effective methods for treating fear disorders like phobias: show the phobic friendly snakes until they feel comfortable, even ready to hold them.
The idea is that you essentially create new, better memories that outcompete the frightful ones.
What’s so great about virtual reality, says LaBar, is that you can show any kind of fear trigger in any context.
Snakes in the woods.
Snakes in the office.
Snakes in bed. (Wait, that was Freud.)
LaBar’s studies show that extinction therapy is more effective when carried out in these diverse settings.
The keep-on-doing-it-safely strategy can also work outside the shrink’s office.
It’s how most of us learn to push ourselves in risky sports, a little bit at a time, gradually gaining skills and confidence.
Taken to an extreme, you get Jeb Corliss, the videogenic BASE jumper whose recent stunts include flying 123 miles per hour in a wingsuit between two canyon walls spaced just 25 feet apart.
Unexpectedly, Corliss claims he used to be a fraidycat.
“I’ve spent my whole life confronting fear,” says Corliss, who’s 38. “I’ve been obsessed with it since childhood. When things terrified me, I was compelled to confront them. I was afraid of snakes, so I started catching snakes–first garter snakes, then bigger snakes, then finally rattlesnakes. Then I became obsessed with sharks, so I started diving. I didn’t want these fears to have power and control over me."
Then, in South Africa in 2012, Corliss jumped off a ledge, misread a target, and slammed into a granite wall at 120 mph.
He broke his left fibula and both ankles, ripped his ACL, cut open his body, and went into kidney failure.
After a few days in the hospital, a psychologist came to see him about PTSD.
“She was like, ‘Wow, you’re doing fine. This has not affected you in the slightest,’ ” Corliss says.
A few months and skin grafts later, he was back in the suit.
OK, Corliss is a bit of an outlier.
Most of us have bigger struggles after a bad accident.
Unfortunately, exposure methods don’t always work, especially for violent or complex fears.
The brain is a three-pound organ of survival.
It doesn’t necessarily want you to feel comfortable doing dangerous things.
It wants you to go home and bake baklava.
“Even with regular extinction therapy, you can get the return of fear,” says Marie Monfils, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
This is because the original trauma memory is still rooted in your hippocampus, ready to bark at your amygdala alongside the new memories of better times on the battlefield or in the tube.
This has been the experience for big-wave champion Greg Long, who almost died while surfing a three-story wave off Southern California’s Cortes Bank in 2012.
Long was battered by the break and forced down under three massive waves until he lost consciousness near the surface.
A jet skier finally pulled him out.
Returning to sea wasn’t easy. “I went back out less than a month later,” says Long, 31. “It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. There was instant fear and panic, the thought that I don’t want to be here. It’s still hard. Overcoming those fears is about getting beyond emotions and respecting the process. Sometimes those emotions are there, sometimes not. I like to think it’s easier the more I do it, but I’m going to carry them with me forever.”
As Long is finding out, the anticipation of a threat can be as bad as the threat itself.
As he and LaBar describe it, memory is glued to emotion in things we’re supposed to remember.
That’s why fear memories make our palms sweat.
So the main idea in any number of fear-mastery techniques is to peel away the memory from the emotion.
To get all Zen about it, it’s not the dragon that scares us, it’s our response to the dragon.
The trick, then, is to tame ourselves.
Our dragons first travel to the brain through a sensory pathway, such as the optic thalamus, LaBar explains.
Within 100 milliseconds, before our conscious brain even knows it, the threat signal rushes to the amygdala, the small but powerful emotional core.
It’s the amygdala that pulls the alarm on our autonomic nervous system for a surging heartbeat, the result of which is rapid breathing, buckling bowels, that cold sensation as your blood leaves your surface layers to travel to muscle, and so on.
By now the information has traveled back up to our neocortex via neurotransmitters like cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine.
If the amygdala is our inner hysterical hausfrau, the highly evolved neocortex is our let’s-be-reasonable-here negotiator.
Between them something of a power struggle ensues.
In some people, the amygdala tends to stay in charge, while in others, quick, strategic decision making takes over.
Part of this tendency is inherited, but it’s also subject to manipulation through training, willpower, and a nice dose of Xanax or propranolol, a beta-blocker that prevents adrenaline from binding to cell receptors.
Propranolol is also known as the stage-fright drug; an opera singer once thoughtfully smuggled me a dose before my first book talk.
By lowering your heart rate, it literally makes you calm, cool, and collected.
Regrettably, it does not turn you into Winston Churchill.
In a perfect world, we would all react optimally to fear, use it to assess risk, calculate our best options, and return rapidly to baseline.
When ski guide Allen O’Bannon, coauthor of the classic Allen & Mike’s Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book, stepped onto a patch of rotten snow while ice climbing in the Wind River Range in 1995, he found himself falling 300 feet.
Time slowed.
An image came to his mind from a conversation he’d had with another ice climber who’d survived a fall.
He’d told O’Bannon that he’d rolled into a ball to keep his crampons and ice ax from catching on the slope and creating a worse impact zone.
O’Bannon pulled in his arms and legs until his rope finally arrested him.
Now 50 and a risk manager for Denver-based Polar Field Services, he tells clients, mostly scientists, about the power of preparation.
In a crisis, O’Bannon explains, some people panic and some stay cool.
The vast majority, though, fall into what he calls “the bewildered state,” in which they pretty much do nothing to take charge of their situation.
“I push training in as many simulations as you can,” he says. “At what distance will you pull your bear spray? How will you react when you fall into a river? The idea is to know what failure feels like. If you can’t train, visualize. Then your response becomes automatic.”
When Greg Long was unable to breathe under the waves, he stayed calm and slowly climbed his leash line to the surface.
He’d trained for years to hold his breath past the comfort zone; he knew what it felt like.
“There was no panic, no questioning, just, This is what I’m going to do if I’m going to survive,” he says. “There were no negative thoughts or wasted energy. I was totally focused. Until we let go of our fears, we don’t begin to reach our potential capabilities.”
Sometimes fear can help provide the focus we need.
People who are comfortable on its jagged edge know how to use it to their advantage.
“Fear is energy,” says Jaimal Yogis, a surfer and author of last year’s science-steeped memoir The Fear Project.
Fear, he says, is mediated by arousal systems similar to those for sex and exercise.
That’s why it feels good to experience it in the context of a horror movie or a Class III rapid.
When our nervous systems are aroused but not in full alarm, we are paying attention.
Our senses are primed.
Our working memory increases.
We feel alive.
The flip side of fear is flow, that delicious state in which time drops away and you are fully engaged and present.
Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has studied what happens to volunteers taking timed math tests.
Most people experience math anxiety.
Their cortisol levels rise, and their misery and self-doubt actually inhibit their working memory, causing them to perform worse than they would otherwise. But an interesting thing happens to people who are confident in their math skills: the cortisol actually makes them better.
They become more focused.
Does this mean we’re doomed if we fear math or that steep tree run that makes our knees shake?
No, says Beilick. Because we can learn to tune out the negative thought stream–paralysis by analysis–that drains precious cognitive juice.
This overthinking is the classic choke pathway known all too well by professional athletes.
“You’re not born a choker,” she says.
In other words, you can go from being someone who is hamstrung by fear to someone who is impelled by it.
But it takes some work, says Beilock. “People can train themselves out. You can sing a song, distract yourself in the moment. Think about the outcome you want rather than your knees. Have a one-word mantra.”
Canadian slopestyle skier Kaya Turski says that if she can get a grip, anyone can.
“I am a high-anxiety person, one of the most nervous athletes,” says the 26-year-old X Games gold medalist.
“I tend to overthink things. Going into these events, I generally feel like the world is on the line.”
After Turski ripped her third ACL on a switch 720 just six months before the Sochi Olympics, she knew the recovery would be as much mental as physical.
Because of her anxieties, she’d already started working with Los Angeles sports psychologist Michael Gervais, who helped Felix Baumgartner overcome his panic attacks before dropping like a rock from space in 2012, free-falling 24 miles and breaking the sound barrier.
The crux of their work has been mindfulness training.
“I meditate every day,” says Turski. “As soon as your mind wanders, that’s when you introduce fear. It’s as simple as tuning back into the now. I haven’t perfected this, but it has 100 percent changed my life.”
The work was central to her comeback.
It helped her take her eighth gold in worldwide X Games, but it couldn’t keep her from catching a bad cold and falling–twice–in Sochi.
She placed 19th.
“That experience shook me more than anything had ever shaken me,” Turski says. “It was a reality check. Things don’t always go your way. So I got back on the meditation track. Life isn’t so bad. You have to emerge into the light. Here I learned that I could survive something.”
Few seem to have mastered fear so completely as Alex Honnold and Dean Potter, both of whom do unimaginably terrifying things hundreds of feet off the ground without a safety net.
“I wouldn’t say I don’t get afraid,” says Honnold, 29, who is known for his free-solo ascents of big walls.
“It’s just that I’m more rational about it. If you’re fully in control of the variables, you shouldn’t have anything to be afraid of. Walking on a handrail or beam, if you know you can do it, it shouldn’t really matter how big the drop is.”
But that attitude has taken time to cultivate. “I think mastery of fear is a skill,” he says. “It may be partly that I’m more skilled at soloing. I’m less nervous about a lot of things now. In general I’m more relaxed.”
Dean Potter’s mother was a yoga teacher.
That awareness of stillness came in handy in 2012, when the 42-year-old wingsuit jumper highlined a mile-high, 130-foot span across China’s Enshi Grand Canyonwith zero protection.
“I’m not so good at sitting on the floor and meditating,” says Potter. “I use those skills way better when I’m moving. Any time I’m having difficulty, I focus on the breath, on relaxed breathing. If I have a combination of calm and fear, I access mental states way beyond normal consciousness. That’s why I choose to do scary things.”
Whatever Honnold and Potter have, the military would like to bottle it, and so would a lot of coaches.
Although Marines might prefer a pill to the lotus position, the data on meditation’s ability to calm the nervous system is impressive, says Martin Paulus, director of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Laureate Institute for Brain Research.
Marine training already includes four-count “combat breathing” during stress.
The Naval Health Research Center, along with the Office of Naval Research, recently conducted a study in which infantry Marines learned other tricks for hacking their fear systems, including “nonjudgmentally paying attention” to passing thoughts and feelings.
In brain scans, Marines who received the eight-week training showed less activation in the anterior cingulate, a midbrain region that processes emotions, and in the insula, which trafficks in physical sensations.
Paulus, who was on the team for the study, says that these regions work to dampen the amygdala so the more rational cortex can step in.
This study and others also show that mindfulness can help people recover from fear by making their brains more resilient.
After the course, called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, these brain regions in the Marines seemed to gain efficiency, and they more closely resembled those of Navy SEALs and elite athletes.
When researchers deliberately stressed Marines by restricting their breathing and showing them pictures of angry faces, the meditators returned more quickly to lower heart rates, and their brains released less neuropeptide Y, a transmitter associated with stress.
The military is also experimenting with virtual reality at Buckley Air Force Base, outside Denver, to prep its troops for deployment.
The idea is to expose National Guard members to the experience of seeing and handling human remains, and of witnessing violence and death, while teaching them techniques to deal with the stress.
These include mindfulness, but also reframing the events in less fearful ways.
Sometimes just talking or writing about fear reduces its power, says Matt Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA.
His lab looked at volunteers who were desperately afraid of spiders and had them go through exposure therapy (with real arthropods this time).
Researchers told half the group to speak about how terrified they were.
Lieberman calls this process labeling.
Unexpectedly, these were the most successful patients, the ones “who could eventually put their hand in the cage and rub spiders with Q-tips,” says Lieberman. “We think labeling turns on the system that regulates brain learning in a long-term way that doesn’t have to activate the amygdala,” he says.
In other words, articulating their fears out loud activated a different part of the brain, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that detours the fear from the brain stem.
These subjects were better able to keep their wits about them, literally, since wits exist far outside the amygdala.
LaBar and others are also trying to help the cortex override the amygdala, which has implications for the treatment of PTSD.
Recall that during exposure therapy, two memories are competing for dominance: the trauma memory and the safety memory.
If you can literally reach out and poke neurons in certain parts of the cortex–for example, the ventral medial zone, associated with emotional regulation–then you can help the safety memory win the wrestling match.
Based on rat studies, one way to do this is with deep-brain electrodes or transcranial magnetic stimulation, already used occasionally to treat severe depression.
This is a lot of work to suppress a bad memory, but someday soon scientists envision shortcuts, through the help of drugs, technology, specially timed therapy, or a combination of approaches.
Because wouldn’t it be better to just wipe out that bad memory–or replace it altogether?
The idea that we can master our fears is alluring.
It’s one of Hollywood’s favorite plot devices, and it represents the ultimate Cartesian transcendence of reason over biology.
But as scientists are increasingly learning, the mind, and not just the brain, is biological.
Memories themselves are patched into neurons by calcium and proteins, and the whole process is mediated by a neurotransmitter called glutamate.
The memories exist in specific places in our hippocampus, like books in a library, from which they can be retrieved. Scientists had assumed that those static memories would be there forever, even if dementia meant that we couldn’t always access them.
But recent research suggests that each time you check out those memories, they have the potential to be updated or changed.
According to the University of Texas’s Monfils, the act of retrieval seems to engage new proteins and chemical reactions, to the point that the memory itself becomes briefly destabilized.
She studies this effect in rats that, like I was, were fear-conditioned to a cue (in their case, a tone instead of a spider) with an electroshock.
If you expose the rats to a harmless tone up to six hours after they were last scared, the memory loses its attachment to fear.
Wait longer than six hours and it solidifies into concrete.
Monfils believes that if you time standard exposure therapy to this window of rewriting, you can “reconsolidate” the memory in a helpful way.
“We can update the memory and prevent the return of fear,” she says.
This holds promise for humans with PTSD, as do drug interventions using beta-blockers during memory reconsolidation.
But these are early days. “It would be irresponsible to suggest that these are real techniques. It’s definitely science fiction right now,” says Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscience professor at New York University, who has collaborated with Monfils.
It’s hard not to think about this without imagining yourself on the set of Total Recall or The Bourne Identity, because the implications are profound and definitely a little creepy.
Without your original memories, are you still you?
Are we willing to sacrifice a little selfhood at the altar of better performance or national security?
After all, we’d be much better killing machines if we didn’t remember we killed.
Personally, I’m not ready for the loss of fear.
I like the sweet spot of fear and courage.
That’s where mountains get scaled and rivers descended and the heroes still come home.
Most of all, it’s where the greatest acts of creativity occur–and, with them, stories about fear and courage.
In the act of telling and the act of listening, we celebrate the melding of our old and new brains, which is, after all, where we become human.
Contributing editor Florence Williams is the author of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.
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I ran across this today.
Have you seen this interview about past life regression and speaking other languages not used anymore? 9 years of follow up too.
To me it demonstrates how we can access our other lives including the wisdom gained from living that experience.
“Xenoglossy is the rare ability of an individual to speak a language they have not learned in their present lifetime. It has been studied by researchers and is considered evidential of reincarnation, or at least anomalous cognition.
These unusual cases are instructive in other regards as well. Dr. Semkiw is the author of Return of the Revolutionaries.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2mmEYEzwjo&feature=youtu.be
Have you seen this interview about past life regression and speaking other languages not used anymore? 9 years of follow up too.
To me it demonstrates how we can access our other lives including the wisdom gained from living that experience.
“Xenoglossy is the rare ability of an individual to speak a language they have not learned in their present lifetime. It has been studied by researchers and is considered evidential of reincarnation, or at least anomalous cognition.
These unusual cases are instructive in other regards as well. Dr. Semkiw is the author of Return of the Revolutionaries.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2mmEYEzwjo&feature=youtu.be
Skarekrow
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It’s forced concentration…forced presence…and climbing it was also very meditative…you have to be calm or you will shake and fall.
Skarekrow
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I have posted a few stories about this in this thread somewhere! ahaha
Anyhow, the most prominent one I can remember was about a Chinese lady that fell into a coma and woke up speaking fluent English…this was just recently too.
Very cool, thanks for posting!
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Skarekrow
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This is not a picture of me but I have been in this spot (or even tighter) more times than I can count.
Is it strange to find that peaceful?
Is it strange that my happy place in my mind consists of me lying on a giant sun-warmed granite rock?
When you turn of your lights in a cave, you can hallucinate very fast, there is zero outside light - the mind wanders and shows you things.
Skarekrow
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Discover your Psychic Abilities (PSI-Q)
Assess your psychic tendencies by answering 52 simple questions
http://www.psychicscience.org/psiq.aspx
Here are my own results:
Psi-Q was 87% overall
ESP - 100%
Psychokinesis - 88%
Precognition - 81%
Scrying (Crystal gazing) - 88%
Auras - 81%
Mediumship - 88%
Channelling - 81%
Past Life - 100%
Luck - 68% (my lowest score)
Intuition - 100%
Imagination - 100%
Paranormal belief - 100%
Creativity - 75%
Assess your psychic tendencies by answering 52 simple questions
http://www.psychicscience.org/psiq.aspx
Here are my own results:
Psi-Q was 87% overall
ESP - 100%
Psychokinesis - 88%
Precognition - 81%
Scrying (Crystal gazing) - 88%
Auras - 81%
Mediumship - 88%
Channelling - 81%
Past Life - 100%
Luck - 68% (my lowest score)
Intuition - 100%
Imagination - 100%
Paranormal belief - 100%
Creativity - 75%
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This is not a picture of me but I have been in this spot (or even tighter) more times than I can count.
Is it strange to find that peaceful?
Is it strange that my happy place in my mind consists of me lying on a giant sun-warmed granite rock?
When you turn of your lights in a cave, you can hallucinate very fast, there is zero outside light - the mind wanders and shows you things.
No I don't find it strange at all. It's just when I look at this picture I find myself holding my breath. I remember reading fantasy and scifi novels where the main characters had to travel underground through the earth to emerge and survive. They were often down there for days and days and I would be in near panic until they got out. [shrugs] I've never had a bad experience trekking through caves and I've been to Natural Bridge Caverns a couple of times and Carlsbad Caverns 4 times.
Each trek became a little more anxious for me if we had to go into small areas. I love Carlsbad because it's huge and cool and dry. But that kind of spot you depict would freak me out and I'd have an attack right then and there.
Carlsbad seemed like a serene place to me. Like being in the womb of the Mother Earth herself. So I can see why you'd feel peaceful with the rocks close around you. The Earth is hugging you.
On the other hand I very much like the idea of being on a sun warmed giant granite rock. I have spent many many days climbing up mountains and stealing rocks. :tongue:
I've been here too!
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Wow! That is really beautiful!No I don't find it strange at all. It's just when I look at this picture I find myself holding my breath. I remember reading fantasy and scifi novels where the main characters had to travel underground through the earth to emerge and survive. They were often down there for days and days and I would be in near panic until they got out. [shrugs] I've never had a bad experience trekking through caves and I've been to Natural Bridge Caverns a couple of times and Carlsbad Caverns 4 times.
Each trek became a little more anxious for me if we had to go into small areas. I love Carlsbad because it's huge and cool and dry. But that kind of spot you depict would freak me out and I'd have an attack right then and there.
Carlsbad seemed like a serene place to me. Like being in the womb of the Mother Earth herself. So I can see why you'd feel peaceful with the rocks close around you. The Earth is hugging you.
On the other hand I very much like the idea of being on a sun warmed giant granite rock. I have spent many many days climbing up mountains and stealing rocks. :tongue:
I've been here too!
I have never been to Carlsbad Caverns but it’s on my list of stuff to do.
Once you are serious about caving, you join the National Speleological Society and get in with those guys…most of the caves have longs since been removed from forestry maps because people go in and destroy them, chip off beautiful crystals that formed for thousands of years and leave trash.
But once they know you are good, they will show you where the “hidden” caves are.
One of the most awesome places I have been is called “Temple Crag”, and I had plans to climb it for the longest time…I never did, but just to stand at the base of it was so incredible!
(again, not me in the photo, but it gives you some perspective on the sheer size of it…I slid down some of the glaciers along side it, not too many in this picture but different years there are more)
The reason the lake is such a turquoise color is from the glacier runoff through the copper in the rocks…..I believe that is either 3rd or 4th lake on the map…we hiked up further to Black Lake (because it was the only one not bright blue…it was black…but it had the best fishing)
We were planning to climb the portion of the crag where you can see the “a” from then photo stock picture…just to the right of that…to to point that comes up like a castle kind of…anyhow…it was about 16 pitches…which is a rope length…then my arthritis started up.
Glad I got to see it and touch it anyhow.
- MBTI
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 9 Mediator
Wow! That is really beautiful!
I have never been to Carlsbad Caverns but it’s on my list of stuff to do.
Once you are serious about caving, you join the National Speleological Society and get in with those guys…most of the caves have longs since been removed from forestry maps because people go in and destroy them, chip off beautiful crystals that formed for thousands of years and leave trash.
But once they know you are good, they will show you where the “hidden” caves are.
One of the most awesome places I have been is called “Temple Crag”, and I had plans to climb it for the longest time…I never did, but just to stand at the base of it was so incredible!
(again, not me in the photo, but it gives you some perspective on the sheer size of it…I slid down some of the glaciers along side it, not too many in this picture but different years there are more)
The reason the lake is such a turquoise color is from the glacier runoff through the copper in the rocks…..I believe that is either 3rd or 4th lake on the map…we hiked up further to Black Lake (because it was the only one not bright blue…it was black…but it had the best fishing)
We were planning to climb the portion of the crag where you can see the “a” from then photo stock picture…just to the right of that…to to point that comes up like a castle kind of…anyhow…it was about 16 pitches…which is a rope length…then my arthritis started up.
Glad I got to see it and touch it anyhow.
The sheer magnificence of that place would root and ground me to Gaia in one glance. Simply astounding contrast in nature eh?
You are blessed to have been in the presence of such a place. I bet you could feel the power.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Oh yes….the negative ions were thick in the air!
I went on a 40 miles hike once up to Coyote Lake in the Sierra Nevada’s once…it was just above the tree line…you’ve never seen so many stars in your life at the elevation! Got a bad sunburn on my face from the altitude…my nose cracked and bleed and even the whites of my eyes were burned (when I looked up, you could see a red line).
Crazy.
But upon returning, I felt so good, so positive, so grounded, so much as peace…it lasted a good week or so before it faded.