Scientists stamp out fear

Imagine you’re at the free throw line, needing to sink two charities to win a game. Or you could be in a boxing match, needing to score a knockout to snatch victory out of defeat. You could possibly be a sprinter, trying to summon a superhuman burst of speed to get a gold medal. Whatever the case may be, when athletes face high-pressure situations, they mentally go through a lot of processes. A lot of it may be due to unfamiliarity with these kinds of circumstances, past traumas or bad experiences, lack of mental preparation, or anxiety.

Sometimes they overthink and lose practiced, instinctive skills. You can see it when an athlete’s performance gradually declines during a match or game. Conversely, they could simply panic, which is underthinking that causes one to abandon strategy altogether and lose control due to sudden freezing (panic). Although scientific data suggests that 85 percent of what we fear never happens, in sports, facing fear of an event or person is all too prevalent.

In research published two weeks ago by Radboud University in the Netherlands, scientists claim that, using sound, they can suppress the fear response in humans. The focus of the work was the amygdala, the small part of the brain that processes emotions, fear and memory, and is thought to trigger the fight or flight response, aggression, anxiety and response to rewards.

Using ultrasound stimulation, the scientists blasted the amygdalae of healthy patients with a focused, low-intensity series of sound waves designed to suppress its activity. They followed this up with visual images of snakes coupled with mild electric shocks to stimulate a fear response.

They discovered that the treatment lowered the probability of participants to associate fear or threat with the chosen stimuli. There was no possibility of damage to the brain itself; it just learned to get less attached to fear. Several animals with small amygdala and no fully developed limbic system have been proven to be more aggressive and less fearful.

To confirm their findings, they also did a parallel experiment on the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory. This proved that brain stimulation has no effect on fear, and that it is associated exclusively with the amygdala.

Even though the effects of the sound waves are short-lived, it may be enough to get people below the tipping point of when the event or circumstance becomes traumatic or ingrained in one’s memory. Intensity and emotional response go together to drive memories deeper into our subconscious. So there is also a chance that anxiety and even post-traumatic stress disorder may be alleviated with this new method. Whoever thought that a little bit of sound could be such a good thing?

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Catch the new episodes of Secret Sports Stories and Basketball Universe PHL online tonight.