Reply With QuoteFear is bad somehow?
Fear is bad somehow?
Good. Maybe they can do something about my persistent fear of flying. I manage it with copious amounts of Xanax, but it'd be nice to be able to get on an airplane without having to sleep for 12 hours afterwards.
Does this make religion obsolete now?
Now they just need to INVERT the process so we can make fear bombs. We'll blanket Iraq with them, and everyone will be so afraid to leave their homes that no one will be able to bomb anything or commit genocide on anyone!
This is just the thing to get people to post in P&R again! :)
I'm not completely sure about this, at least not for me personally. I've always found that dealing with my fears myself, rather than trying to avoid them with some drug or trick, has allowed me to overcome them. Fear of flying, fear of travelling alone, fear of rejection, etc. have all kept me, at some time, from doing what I want, but I've just gone and done the things that caused me fear.
Not just flying, but flying and rationalising to myself why it is perfectly ok to be afraid, but also why I shouldn't be. Not just travelling alone, but pushing the boundaries and going further, travelling to places I'd previously have not dared travel to even with a companion. All of these things have helped the fears seem irrational, and it's so much more of an accomplishment to overcome your fears yourself than to pop a pill and hide from them.
WMF!Originally Posted by Machfive
-- Tim
In other news : "MIT Researcher actually talks to pretty girl!"
Yeah sure - but some people may experience the emotion more strongly then you do. Your average person doesn't need a drug like this, but people who are totally debilitated by their fears (like agoraphobics) do.
Not unless you're afraid of 99 virgins waiting hand and foot on you in heaven.
Something about this research scares the shit out of me.
We have nothing to fear but the lack of fear itself?
Can't wait. I find fear to be pretty useless, socially.
I misread this as "Fear of the Cure found".
So how do they differentiate between irrational or exaggerated fears and legitimate save-your-ass fears? What happens when you take a fear pill for a public speaking engagement and then don't hit the brakes fast enough when someone runs a stoplight on your way there?
I obviously have no idea exactly what spectrum of "fear" they are preventing, but I doubt that social anxiety and reaction time are closely intertwined.
I wouldn't imagine that the reason you step on your brake at a stoplight is due to a fear response. It seems like you can rationally deduce that failure to stop at a stoplight is likely to lead to your getting t-boned and possibly killed. Maybe a better analogy would be what happens when you go to pet a dog that's snapping and snarling at you.
My fear of normal flight is an irrational fear. I'm perfectly and rationally aware that airplane flight is no more dangerous (and in some cases far less dangerous) than things I do everyday without a second thought. And yet, getting on a plane is a major ordeal for me...I still do it, but it's an incredibly uncomfortable experience for me.
Now if the engines are on fire and we're in a steep downward descent, fear would be an appropriate response...
Last edited by charmtrap; 07-16-2007 at 04:16 PM. Reason: break?
Awesome. Now we can all be Green Lanterns!
*spills beer all over keyboard*
Damnit!
I used this technique to cure my fear of flying.
I knew I was cured when I felt a bump, jumped up in my seat, and realized that we had landed and I had slept through an entire flight from before takeoff.
My cure for FEAR involved seeing one office level after another after another...
Though you wouldn't know it from reading the responses here, the article is actually about inhibiting a certain enzyme to desensitize the brain to specific, learned fears that have developed into irrational and debilitating disorders (such as PTSD). It's not a magical drug that makes you immune to all fear.
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