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(photo Source: Pexels) Writing | A Xian

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Have you ever played the VR game in the mall?

In recent years, with the development of technology and the gradual popularization of virtual reality, more and more companies have developed related products to take people to swim in the virtual world. With the characteristics of the virtual world, VR technology has gradually become a new means of psychotherapy.

In April 2022, Prof. Daniel Freeman, a professor at the University of Oxford in England, published a study showing that VR technology can effectively treat anxiety patients with agoraphobia. The research team constructed daily scenes in virtual reality and encouraged patients to accomplish insurmountable fears in an apparently fictional space.

Demonstrated virtual reality (VR) parachute trainer | wiki the United States has been using VR technology for psychotherapy for a long time and is most commonly used to treat soldiers who return from the battlefield and suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). PTSD refers to the sequelae of mental disorder after people encounter or fight against heavy pressure, such as soldiers affected by cruel war will get PTSD after leaving the army, resulting in depression, nightmares and other symptoms.

"exposure therapy (exposure therapy), which is traditionally used to treat PTSD, requires patients to recall situations related to psychological trauma," said Rizzo, director of the Institute of Innovation and Technology in Southern California. "but an important feature of PTSD patients is that they avoid everything that reminds them of psychological trauma, so it's hard to ask patients to recall a scene they want to avoid clearly."

Because the patient refused to imagine the trauma-related environment, Rizzo's team decided to use VR to recreate the situation, which can be controlled by clinicians and customized the whole virtual world according to the patient's traumatic experience, so that the patient can walk in the world safely. With this therapy, Rizzo and his team have created a total of 14 virtual worlds, with all kinds of worlds.

In addition to the game field, more and more scientists are aware of the potential power of VR. Pexels patients can build their own VR world, for example, they can mark the boulder next to them as a bad mood, then hold it up and throw it into the sea; they can also describe occasional memories and inner thoughts to anything in the world.

These things that are given new symbols and new meanings by patients in the VR world will become driftwood for patients in psychotherapy and let doctors understand them better. In addition, every interaction and raving in the virtual reality can be recorded by the doctor to facilitate the review after the end of the treatment.

(Pexels) Chris Brewin, a professor of clinical psychology at University College London, and his team recruited 15 patients who were treating depression and fitted them with virtual reality devices. First of all, the patient will see a virtual character with an adult appearance in the virtual reality, and the virtual character can also follow and imitate the patient's body movements through technology. The patients then saw a crying virtual child in the virtual reality, and the researchers asked them to comfort the child. At this point, the patient will change roles and project himself into a crying child, and then the virtual adult next to him will follow the patient and say words of comfort and love to the child.

It is as if the patient divides into a strong part of himself (the adult in the virtual reality) to comfort the hurt self (the crying child). This visible and audible sympathy softens the patient's self-criticism and enhances self-compassion. Nine of the 15 patients in the study had lower levels of depression one month after the study.

Cows: no one loves them when they wear sunglasses. [3] not only that, according to a study by the Moscow Ministry of Agriculture and Food in 2019, some local farmers will also use VR headsets to reduce cow anxiety and increase milk production, raising "the overall mood of the herd."

In addition to psychotherapy, Canadian scientists are also preparing to use VR to help people build memory palaces. (memory palaces are an ancient memory technology that was originally used by ancient Greek and Roman orators to remember lengthy texts. It is one of the most effective ways for people to memorize non-spatial information by using their strong spatial memory ability.)

Giulio Camillo Krokos et al's description of the memory palace in 1511 A.D. [2] imagine a building in your mind, and then "place" the things you need to remember in it, relying on the spatial relationship of memory to establish order and recall memory content. With visual associations, it's easy to extract information from your mind later-you just need to remember where they were placed in the memory palace.

The visualization process of imagining a building in your mind is one of VR's strengths. If we can use VR to create a space to enhance our impression of the building, will the memory stored here be more profound?

Virtual memory Palace apartment Design | references [2] researchers at Sheridan College (Sheridan college) in Canada did this experiment and published a paper in the journal Virtual Reality. The researchers built an apartment in the VR world with rooms with different functions, such as a restaurant, a bathroom and a living room, and tried to make subjects walk around the VR with their feet as freely as they did in daily life, hoping to walk into the memory palace as unburdened as possible through visual and physical movements.

After quitting the VR environment, the researchers asked subjects to recall words they had learned in virtual reality. The results showed that the subjects were 20.4% more likely to successfully memorize the vocabulary than the traditional way of memory, and the learning effect was better.

A bedroom of virtual memory palace apartment; b virtual memory palace apartment balcony | reference [2] Matthew James Vogl, founder and executive director of the National Center for Mental Health Innovation, has concluded that in this era of increasingly common psychological problems, the development of VR technology has brought more possibilities to the mental health industry.

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Perhaps, only in the VR world can you find your true self.

Reference:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/20/can-virtual-reality-cure-phobias

[2] Moll, B., Sykes, E. Optimized virtual reality-based Method of Loci memorization techniques through increased immersion and effective memory palace designs: a feasibility study. Virtual Reality (2022). Https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00700-z

[3] https://msh.mosreg.ru/sobytiya/novosti-ministerstva/25-11-2019-10-07-55-na-podmoskovnoy-ferme-testirovali-vr-ochki-dlya-ko

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything.

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