This Neurobiologist Swims With Great White Sharks to Study Fear

Key Takeaways

the first thing that comes through your mind when you see a white shark coming towards you is oh my goodness that's a white shark it looks like in the movies they're long but their girth is what's incredible the bodies of these animals are just enormous they're very aggressive and dangerous animals but we could collect very close but within inches footage of these animals by getting in there with the virtual reality technology the idea is to create the most realistic fear exploration studies and the only way to do that is to go into the field and experience real fear the Huberman lab it's basically a wide-range kingdom of neuroscience tools and technique everyone in the lab is interested in some basic and important question about how the brain works how it wires up during development or how to make it better in response to injuries disease or experience the other question that we're working on is how is fear represented in the brain we discovered recently rain area that when it's active converts the fear response into a courage response people talk about fight-or-flight but that's really a misnomer most animals including humans don't fight when they're afraid they either run or they freeze let's round the brain area that sits smack dab in the middle of the brain that when activated encourages the animals to confront their fears behaviorally the Huberman lab is using virtual reality to test some of the ideas and mechanisms that we've discovered in mice in humans by combining in visual stimulation through the VR with auditory stimulation and even tactile stimulation what we call mixed reality so you can create brain and body sensations if you will that are extremely realistic and from that standpoint it's not just a tool it's a power tool for neuroscience not just the belief but the sensation the feeling that they're in that real-world environment so that real world environment could be walking along the edge of a very tall building with fear of falling off or the experience of swimming with great white sharks and at the same time we're monitoring things like the size of their pupil of their eye which is a readout of how how much stress or arousal they're undergoing at any moment we're recording their breathing we're recording their body posture we want to create the most realistic fear neuroscience laboratory possible and in order to do that we have to go straight to the source and have the real experiences to bring them to the lab so we're out next to not on but next to Guadalupe Island Mexico there's nothing else around the great white sharks come here each year feed the water here are loaded with tuna mackerel and seals we plant anchor then we lower cages each day one cage is reviewing the sharks that come in to the surface to feed there's another cage that we lower by crane from the boat which drops down to 30 feet [Music] I was measuring people's stress levels and giving people tools to control their stress levels and the reason for this is to be able to compare those tools that we use in the field with the tools that we're using in the laboratory we edit the footage and then bring it into the laboratory where you or other subjects you can come in and get the experience of what it's like to swim with those animals you basically get the experience as real as it can get except you're not in the actual water we want to change the way that mental disease and fear related mental diseases like chronic anxiety phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as depression and other anxiety related disorders are diagnosed by incorporating objective measurable things like heartrate like breathing likes pupil size in addition to what people say and so we imagine that the data are going to be immensely useful for diagnosing mental disease so that when people say that they're feeling better or that they're not feeling better we can start to attach some real physiological measures to those statements and start to compare them and I feel it's my obligation as a scientist and as a human being really to develop new tools for the treatment of these incredibly debilitating disorders it's also just an immensely interesting problem not at a very basic level I want to understand how the brain works and if I get to die with some great white sharks - well that's pretty cool in another episode of science the extremes a hurricane hunter goes straight to the eye of the storm thanks for watching and subscribe to the channel