Why does it work in real life if it’s virtual?

 

Virtual reality goes beyond reality

 

It may be surprising to learn that facing our fears in virtual reality can really help in real life, but it makes sense when we look at it from the point of view of how the mind works. Have you ever been afraid for no reason, or thought you saw or heard an intruder, and did it make you fear the worst and shudder for no reason? No need to suffer from an anxiety disorder feel that! In situations of intense stress, emotions (like fear) and physical sensations overcome us to the point that we can no longer think rationally… whether the situation is real or not. When anxiety and fear become strong enough to hinder the sufferer’s daily functioning, we call it an anxiety disorder, and in these cases the imagination and the emotions can play tricks on us. A person who has a spider phovia, for example, doesn’t need to see a real spider to be anxious; the mere image of a spider, a film about spiders or sometimes even just a black spot on the ceiling or the thought of seeing a spider are enough to create anxiety. The same reaction occurs with all the other phobias and anxiety disorders, whether the fear of public speaking, agoraphobia or the fear of flying.

 

When the brain’s centre of emotions perceives something that is associated with what frightens us, it automatically sets off an alarm reaction. Sometimes the alarm reaction is justified, sometimes it isn’t. Either way, this information arrives at the centre of emotions in 12 one-thousandths of a second, or 7 one-thousandths of a second faster than the time needed to go through the centre responsible for logical analysis. Thus the fear reaction is extremely rapid and involves the emotions somewhat before it involves logic.

 

The current state of knowledge leads us to believe that virtual reality draws its effectiveness from this difference between emotions and logic. People with a fear of something are hypersensitive to certain details and these details set off an irrational fear as soon as they are perceived, whether they are real or virtual. Virtual reality therefore allows us to recreate the essential features of a situation to trigger the fear reaction, at an acceptable therapeutic level, and thus allow clients to learn how to control it and encode in their emotional memory that the situation isn’t dangerous. Studies have shown that the realism of virtual reality images seem less important than the fact of having the impression of being “there” inside the virtual environment, a phenomenon known as a “feeling of presence”.