The Study
Towards an unconscious neural reinforcement intervention for common fears
This study found that when people’s brains were trained to think about scary things without them even knowing it, their bodies reacted less fearfully — like their heart didn’t race as much. But it doesn’t mean the fear is gone for good, or that it works for people with real phobias.
Analysis score
Maximum 90 for a randomized controlled trial.
Where the score came from
Scientists taught people’s brains to stop reacting fearfully to spiders or snakes by rewarding them when their brain activity matched the pattern of fearing that animal — all while they were unaware of what they were being trained to do.
Where does this study sit?
Reviews of RCTs (Meta-analyses)
Max 100Randomized Trials
Max 90Reviews of Cohort Studies
Max 85Cohort Studies
Max 72Reviews of Case-Control Studies
Max 63Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional & Case Series
Max 50Expert Opinion
Max 572 / 100
Quality score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. The gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Key takeaways
Summary
Based on the study abstract and findings.
- 1Yes — this suggests a new way to treat phobias without making people confront their fears directly, which could help those who quit therapy because it's too scary.
- 2Fear responses dropped by medium effect sizes (d = 0.55–0.62).
- 3Participants couldn't guess which animal they were being trained on (47% accuracy = chance).
- 4Decoding accuracy using other people's brain data was 82.4%, better than using their own data (71.7%).
Score breakdown, methodology, conflicts of interest, evidence analysis & raw study data
Publication
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year
2018
Authors
V. Taschereau-Dumouchel, Aurelio Cortese, T. Chiba, J. Knotts, M. Kawato, H. Lau, H. Lau
Related Content
Claims (6)
When a new rewarding behavior is introduced, it creates a competing neural pathway that replaces existing reward patterns linked to maladaptive habits.
Using neural data from people who have never encountered certain feared animals, a computational method can identify brain patterns linked to those fears with 82.4% accuracy, surpassing methods that rely on data from the same individual, enabling fear reduction without direct exposure to the feared stimulus.
After unconscious neural reinforcement, people cannot tell which fear was targeted in a forced-choice test, performing no better than random guessing.
During fMRI-based training, targeted neural reinforcement activates the ventral temporal cortex without activating the amygdala or other fear-related brain regions, resulting in reduced fear responses through separation of fear-related neural patterns from emotional processing networks.
When brain activity patterns associated with fear are detected and subtly reinforced using fMRI feedback, physiological fear responses to spiders or snakes decrease in healthy adults with mild fear, as shown by reduced amygdala activity and skin conductance.
Neural reinforcement reduces fear of one specific animal without changing fear of other animals, showing the effect targets only the neural connection to that animal, not overall anxiety.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making health decisions.