Tuesday, July 24, 2007

On Fear


Scientists are on their way to curing fear. I'm afraid that this could get out of hand.

Here's what the folks at MIT accomplished: mice, the usual suspects, were given small shocks when placed in particular environments. Some of them were genetically engineered to have lower levels of a kinase (an enzyme, called Cdk5) than the others. Mice with higher levels had far more difficulty distinguishing between the memory of a shock and the environment in which it was received. Those mice froze. The mice with inhibited kinases felt comfortable enough to continue exploring their environment, despite the painful memories. The men and women in white coats were quick to point out that the mechanism concerns fear based on a traumatic event. They intend to focus their efforts on developing a drug for use with those who suffer from PTSD. But what's to say that they will stop there?

The next frontier would be the kinds of background fears that accumulate as we live our lives and absorb culture, stories, associations, and the like. Many of these fears are irrational, so good riddance. But then there are two seemingly divergent kinds of fears that I'm not ready to part with as yet. In one direction are the fears that we learn over the eons, that are hard-wired by evolutionary experience. And then there is the seemingly ephemeral (because it is so complex that your conscious thoughts only capture bits and pieces on occasion) but actually quite pervasive fear: existential fear. The ability to "cure" or control fear presents a bit of a conundrum in that it could lead to an outbreak of existential crisis.

Let's say that we remove a sufficient amount of fear within the general population through some pharmaceutical means, and not just fear of the trauma-induced kind. People grow less afraid of not just situation-memory links but of concept-concept bonds, such as aging and death. Some may shed their belief in a higher power and the comforts of faith, finding less of a need for the narratives of triumph over death and endless renewal that they provide. But then what? Fear reduced, freed from religious dogma, and hopefully not killed prematurely because they forgot to look both ways before crossing the street, what do these human beings do next? Lacking a narrative for what life is all about (remember for a large swath of the newly medicated, their existing supernatural narrative went away along with the kinase levels), but still aware of their impending personal demise, they are ripe for existential malaise. If the reduction in fear does not also address the negative affect that comes with the realization that life is meaningless (at least until another narrative comes along to replace religion), we could find ourselves living among a teeming subpopulation of millions of Woody Allen clones. Hopefully scientists will deal with this side effect and avert a public health crisis.

Fears of all kinds are difficult to pin down. This became apparent to me recently when boingboing.net ran a story about old Sesame Street sketches from the 1970's. The article struck a chord - attached to it grew an endless string of links to YouTube and videos that in one way or another frightened the reader. Why were the skits on children's television so scary back in the day, the readers asked? One reader even exclaimed, "I am having post-traumatic flashbacks just watching it!" Psychedelic rubber-band faces contorting while reciting the numbers one through ten, clown-men who look like stalkers or worse sitting uncomfortably close to the camera while they remove their makeup, a Muppet trying to sell the letter "O" to Ernie with a shadowy, drug-dealer air to him, stop-motion fruits singing in kitchens bathed only in the hues of twilight - is this really how I learned to read and count and move through this new world? Try these on for size:



But then I thought about it and drew the following conclusion: I fear these scenes now, in ways that I could not have possibly feared when I was three years old. I even remember watching Sesame Street. And I remember feeling not fear, but fascination at these clips. Only later did I grasp, with a little help from some enzymes and a lot of careful teaching by forces that I have yet to understand, of what I should really be afraid.

Vaya con Dios - Ordinary Skill

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