Nathalie is agoraphobic and acrophobic, both anxiety disorders, the former involves fear of places or situations that may cause panic, the latter a pathological fear of heights.
To treat her doctors at the Van Gogh hospital in Charleroi, Belgium, are using virtual reality to help her control her fears.
Scientists are using virtual reality to treat bipolar disorder and phobias http://t.co/qR95oeCzLL pic.twitter.com/tWkJpUp5fl — Dave Asprey (@bulletproofexec) August 6, 2015
MindMaze has received $100 million to further medical research and launch a VR gaming system.
For a soldier who has endured an amputation, severe phantom limb pain can be debilitating.
Virtual reality company MindMaze has designed a medical virtual reality, augmented reality, and motion capture video game system that immerses the amputee in a virtual environment, where moving the existing arm will move the non-existing arm of the avatar. Neuroscientist and MindMaze founder and CEO Tej Tadi says this “mirroring” tricks the brain into believing the severed limb is actually there, and has proven benefits in phantom pain management.
Cannot wait to hear Mckenna’s perspective on BMIs for brain connection to all things digital, and microbots used to extend life as well as bionic body parts.
Famed psychonaut Terence Mckenna envisioned a very radical approach of bridging psychedelics with virtual reality to create a supercharged version of consciousness in which language, or rather the meaning behind what we speak, could be made visual in front of our very eyes.
In Mckenna’s “cyberdelic” future of virtual reality, artists and the revival of art, would be at the forefront of innovation, according to a talk he gave to a German audience in 1991.
Does this not still ring true 25 years on? Are not computer programmers and virtual cartographers the modern artists who are pushing the boundaries of our understanding of reality and ourselves?
Posted in futurism
Official Facebook Fan Page of Jim Rohn, the Foremost Personal Achievement Philosopher who inspired millions with his insightful and positive messages…
Here is a concept; “could VR be used to rehabilitate criminals to experience through VR what their victims have experienced?” I do know in the recent 20 yrs a part of rehabilitation has included the criminal facing their victims so that the criminal develops a new level of empathy. However, could VR be a better solution? And, should it be?
LONDON, Feb. 15 (UPI) — Depression patients who interacted with characters in a virtual reality environment were less critical and more compassionate toward themselves, researchers found in a small study in England.
Researchers at University College London found some of the self-directed negativity of people feel in depression can be mitigated through role-playing in virtual reality.
Dropping people into an immersive electronic world using a virtual reality headset gives them an opportunity to experience different scenarios — in this case, by embodying either somebody comforting a distressed child or by receiving the comfort as the distressed child.
People may soon use virtual reality to treat their depression and to be less critical and more compassionate towards themselves, a new study shows. A new virtual reality therapy has effectively reduced depressive symptoms of patients with some reporting significant drop in depression severity.
In the study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open, patients claim virtual reality therapy changed their response to real-life situations in which they would previously have been self-critical.
The findings come from the analysis of the effect of the therapy to 15 depression patients, aged 23 to 61. Researchers, from University College London (UCL) and ICREA-University of Barcelona, asked the participants to wear a virtual reality headset to see from the perspective of a life-size “avatar” or virtual body.
Russia is getting closer in perfecting Quantum Processors.
A team of physicists including Russian researchers succeeded in conducting an experiment in which, for the first time in history, control over ultrafast motion of electrons down to three attoseconds (one attosecond refers to a second as one second refers to the lifetime of the Universe) was proved possible (“Coherent control with a short-wavelength free-electron laser”). This fact paves a way to new directions of research that seemed improbable before. The experiment was conducted with the help of the free-electron laser FERMI located at the “Elettra Sincrotrone” research center in Trieste, Italy.
The speed of chemical, physical and biological processes is extremely high, atomic bonds are broken and restored within femtoseconds (one millionth of one billionth of a second). The Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail was the first to succeed in observing the dynamics of chemical processes, which made him a winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Nevertheless, nature can operate even faster. While atomic motions within a molecule can be measured with femtosecond resolution, the dynamics of electrons, which define the nature of chemical bonds, happens a thousand times faster — within tens and hundreds of attoseconds.
The only tools appropriate for studying such processes are so-called x-ray free-electron lasers. In “conventional” gas, liquid and solid-state lasers, excitation of electrons in the bound atomic state serves as the source of photons. In contrast, free-electron lasers operate with the help of a high-quality electron beam wiggling along a sinusoidal path under the effect of a ray of magnets. During that process electrons lose energy by producing radiation.
Very interesting since many complex neural diseases also have ties to the brain stem such as Dystonia.
Feb. 22, 2016 — There is a new ground zero for Alzheimer’s Disease, according to a new discovery of a critical but vulnerable region in the brain that appears to be the first place affected by late onset Alzheimer’s disease. It also may be more important for maintaining cognitive function in later life than previously appreciated.
The locus coeruleus is a small, bluish part of the brainstem that releases norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter responsible for regulating heart rate, attention, memory, and cognition. Its cells, or neurons, send branch-like axons throughout much of the brain and help regulate blood vessel activity, says a new review of the scientific literature.
Its high interconnectedness may make it more susceptible to the effects of toxins and infections compared to other brain regions, said lead author Mara Mather.
