A team of virtual reality (VR) experts, psychologists, and former Google and Facebook engineers are using modern tools to tackle phobias that humans have faced since the beginning of time — social anxieties, including the top social fear of all, public speaking.
I recently visited the Palo Alto, California, headquarters of Limbix, a startup backed by legendary venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital. What I experienced would not have been possible even 18 months ago. Using mobile VR tools and real-world capture video, Limbix offers a service for therapists to treat patients with anxieties, from the fear of flying or driving to the fear of public of speaking. It builds on traditional exposure therapy, a common and effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias. “It’s the twenty-first century exposure therapy,” says Dr. Sean Sullivan, the company’s director of psychology. “It’s as close as you can get to real life without going into real life.”
More than ten years ago, psychologists began experimenting with VR exposure therapy to help people with social anxieties. Recently, Oxford University psychiatry professors reviewed 285 studies on the topic and concluded, “VR has extraordinary potential to help people overcome mental health problems.” Until recently, however, VR systems were expensive, clunky, and wired to a desktop PC. Today a therapist can buy a mobile Google Daydream headset for about $70. Add a compatible Daydream-ready smartphone and they’re on their way.
In this short video, you can watch Dr. Sullivan leading me through the experience.
As I put on the headset, I found myself in a boardroom with people watching me and my presentation. The people were real, not animated characters you would find in a computer-generated world. To make it feel even more realistic, one of my actual presentations had been loaded on the computer in the virtual room. And it was only the beginning.
The real benefit of the system is that it allows therapists to control the “hierarchy” of the event. Dr. Sullivan started with a “neutral, casual” audience. It represented the least threatening or ‘distressing’ scenario. In the next scene, I was presenting to a more formal business audience. As Sullivan increased the tension, I was exposed to a disengaged audience of people fidgeting, yawning, or staring at their cellphones and computer screens. By controlling the dose of the anxiety-provoking situation in a VR environment, a trained therapist can help patients manage or overcome their anxiety.
Most people will exhibit some physiological response when speaking to others, especially if the stakes are high. ‘Stage fright,’ to a lesser or greater degree, is hardwired in our DNA. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, being accepted or rejected from a group had life and death consequences. Today, the very same primitive brain chemicals are activated when we’re delivering a PowerPoint to a roomful of decision makers. We won’t be banished from the tribe and left to fend on our own if we lose the deal, but the thought of failure in front of the group triggers our primitive fight-or-flight response. Evolutionary psychologists call it an ‘artifact’ from our ancestral background. Unfortunately, this artifact can damage a person’s career prospects or make life very uncomfortable if left unmanaged.
VR exposure therapy could lead to a significant change in the way psychologists treat patients. “With high-quality VR devices reaching the consumer market for the first time, the future is suddenly imminent,” according to Oxford university researchers. “The affordability makes it feasible for the technology to break out of the laboratory and enter the home — and forward-thinking mental health clinics too.”
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