Your imagination really can set you free

Your imagination really can set you free

Imagining a threat can help you conquer your fear of it, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published November 21 in the journal Neuron. The study has strong implications for the treatment of anxiety and fear-related disorders.

The research focused on the difference between how fear is learned and unlearned. People quickly learn to fear a threatening or unpleasant experience, and the fear will recur when cues, like sights or sounds, associated with the bad experience are sensed. This can negatively impact quality of life and underlie emotional disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, and anxiety.

One of the most effective ways to remove this fear is to experience the threatening cues without then having the bad experience, something known as “threat extinction” or “extinction learning.” It is the most prescribed treatment for fear-related disorders.

But this type of therapy is impractical in some cases because the cues associated with a traumatic event may be difficult or unethical to reconstruct (e.g., a war zone) or because the intensity of re-exposure is overwhelming for the patient. In such cases, imagination, an internal simulation of real-life events, is a common treatment tool. But despite imagination’s longstanding recognition in the clinic, it has received little attention from the neuroscientific learning community and, therefore, the neural processes through which imagination affects behavior are unclear.

Source: New research suggests your imagination really can set you free from fear