How VR can help adapt treatment to mental health conditions, potentially saving the NHS money and freeing-up therapists.

Confronting fears in virtual reality could be the future of therapy after a trial by Oxford academics found nearly 3 out of 4 patients with a serious phobia of heights could overcome it, reports the Independent.

In the study a virtual reality coach guided them around a 10-storey building with a large open atrium in the centre, gradually encouraging them to lean over the edge to rescue a cat or cross a rope bridge. Volunteers who had struggled to approach balconies or take escalators for decades had their irrational concerns banished in a matter of hours, without any input from a human therapist.

“In day-to-day life I’m much less averse to edges, and steps, and heights,” one of the trial’s participants said afterwards. “When I’ve always got anxious about an edge I could feel the adrenaline in my legs that fight/flight thing; that’s not happening as much now…I feel as if I’m making enormous progress, and feel very happy with what I’ve gained.” After his treatment, Dick, a retired paramedic whose severe fear has bothered him his entire life was able to relax looking over a shopping centre balcony, something he said “would have been impossible before”.

Acrophobia, the fear of heights, is the most commonly reported phobia with one in five people saying they have some aversion and 5 per cent of the population being clinically diagnosed.

The study recruited 100 volunteers with a formal diagnosis who had had their fear for around 30 years on average. Half of the volunteers (49) were randomly allocated to the VR group although two were unable to complete the therapy because it was too difficult for them.

In six 30-minute sessions with the headsets over two weeks they began with a VR-coach character asking them to explain what caused their fear: whether they were worried they would fall or throw themselves off the building for example, and explaining basic psychology of the condition.

They then entered the virtual building and at each of the ten floors performed tasks, starting with standing near the edge while a safety barrier moved away or dropping a ball. It then progresses to more challenging problems, such as crossing the expanse on a bridge.

After treatment 34 of the 49 participants (69%) were no longer classed as clinically phobic.

This is the first trial to show the benefits of VR-therapy on its own and the team from the University of Oxford say it could be applied to other mental health conditions and help address a critical shortage of doctors in this area.

“As seen in our clinical trial, virtual reality treatments have the potential to be effective, and faster and more appealing for many patients than traditional face-to-face therapies.” They also have the potential to be much more cost effective. While the initial scheme required months of work from programmers, actors and therapists to fine tune, the equipment is available cheaply and can be replicated widely.

Dr Mark Hayward, of the University of Sussex, said the findings were “very promising” for virtual reality, but added that in more serious mental health disorders like psychosis, these treatments still require a professional therapist’s involvement.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/virtual-reality-phobia-fear-heights-mental-health-treatment-oxford-university-lancet-a8442696.html

Can virtual reality improve your sleep?

[Image: courtesy RMIT University]

People who sleep well go to bed calm, while those who don’t lie in bed anxious. But as anyone who has trouble sleeping knows, you can’t always just tell your racing brain to relax and forget about that student loan debt until tomorrow morning. So sleeping poorly can be a self-reinforced cycle. People go to bed anxious because they don’t sleep well. And they don’t sleep well because they go to bed anxious.

New research reported by Fast Company from the Exertion Games Lab at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University has found that there may be a simple solution for some people who have trouble going to sleep: giving them a chance to look at their own brains as they lie in bed.

Scientists invited 12 healthy students into their lab and placed an EEG monitor—or a device that measures electrical brain activity—on their heads. The students laid down and were fitted with a VR headset that contained an artistically interpreted visualization of those brainwaves. The more excited the person’s brain was, the more active the visualization would be, with greater contrast, color, and amplitude.

What researchers found was that after 10 minutes, subjects reported a significant drop in what’s called “pre-sleep cognitive arousal.” That means their minds were quieter and in the state we know leads to good sleep.

While the study didn’t have the subject pool or control groups necessary to be entirely certain that it was the brain visualization, and not just any old visualization, that made the difference, researcher Nathan Semertzidis tells us that findings suggest “the feedback loop” between the sleeper, the visualization, and their brain “is core to the experience.”

As one subject put it in a post-study interview, the visualization was like a tool to relax: “I was drifting off to worries, mainly about work, and [the change in visuals] brought me out of that.”

“The mechanisms which the neurofeedback element of the system operates on is closely aligned with mindfulness meditation,” says Semertzidis, since this system kept people in the moment to avoid rumination and created a sense of calm just as meditation does. “Considering this, it would be possible to achieve similar benefits by performing mindfulness meditation before sleep to move the mind away from focusing on stressors which might otherwise hinder your ability to sleep. However, the downside to this is that mindfulness meditation requires a lot of practice before its benefits can be properly felt.”

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90381066/scientists-discover-a-counterintuitive-trick-to-falling-asleep-faster