Mind and body
Facing a fear, one small virtual step at a time.
Gentle explainer videos on exposure work, relaxation, biofeedback and how to tell whether therapy is helping.
Image: credit
Some fears are hard to practise with. You can't book a thunderstorm for Tuesday at ten, and a crowded train isn't a gentle place to start. Virtual reality lets a therapist build the situation, dial it up or down, and stop the moment it's too much.
These four videos cover exposure therapy, relaxation for pain, biofeedback-guided sessions and, the bit people often skip, measuring progress. They're written for clinicians and researchers, and they're plain enough for anyone who's curious. Nothing here is medical advice.
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On this site
Virtual reality exposure therapy
How can a headset help someone face a fear safely?
VR for deep relaxation and pain management
Can a calm virtual place change how pain feels?
Biofeedback-guided VR sessions
What if the virtual world could notice how you feel?
Measuring progress in VR therapy
How do we know VR therapy is working for this client?
Watch
HVS 6D VR for Research and Rehabilitation, with Biofeedback
A short tour of HVS 6D VR with biofeedback, where the scene responds to how the body is coping.
Video from the HVS Image channel on YouTube. It's loaded in privacy-enhanced mode and only plays when you press play.
From the journals
Research worth knowing about
Recent animal studies on stress, withdrawal and recovery. Early-stage science, summarised gently, with the original linked.
Treadmill time helps rat brains bounce back after morphine
Male rats, some castrated, received morphine twice a day for ten days and then 28 days of mild or moderate treadmill running, with or without testosterone. Withdrawal and castration each dented spatial learning, spatial memory and avoidance memory, and both lowered BDNF in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Both exercise levels helped, moderate running more so, while testosterone's extra benefit was partial and depended on the group. Published in Behavioral and Brain Functions.
Behavioral and Brain Functions
Read the original at Bioengineer.orgHuperzine A and a less obvious memory circuit
In mice with narrowed blood supply to the brain (bilateral carotid occlusion), huperzine A improved water maze, novel object and Y-maze scores without changing how much the animals moved. The China Pharmaceutical University team traced the effect to more acetylcholine in the dorsal striatum, acting through alpha-7 nicotinic receptors and a striatum to substantia nigra pathway. Delivering huperzine A, acetylcholine or donepezil straight into the dorsal striatum reproduced the benefit. The paper appeared in Targetome.
Targetome
Read the original at EurekAlert!Apigenin, noradrenaline and the brain's lactate supply
Eight weeks of D-galactose, a common accelerated-ageing model, impaired mice on object recognition, the water maze and the Y-maze. Apigenin, a flavonoid found in several medicinal herbs, improved all three. The Heilongjiang team links this to the GPR30 receptor, more norepinephrine release and more brain lactate, and they flag limits around the model and the sex of the animals. Published in Frontiers in Pharmacology.
Frontiers in Pharmacology
Read the original at Bioengineer.org