"Pay attention." "We're going to play a game." "Try to count the number of signs on this winding forest road." "Ready?" "Go!" "Ahhhh!" "Did we scare you?" "There's a good chance you just jumped back in your seat." "But we're not just messing with you." "The reaction you just had could actually save your life." "This is a show about your brain and how you respond to fear." "It's not comfortable." "Turn on the lights!" "We're gonna put you through a series of games and experiments." "One, two, three." "God!" "And if you play along, you'll be scared." "Get out of my house!" "You'll get that tingling feeling down your spine." "Ughh!" "And you might just learn how to face your fears." "Prepare to be afraid on Brain Games." "Subtitles Captions by National Geographic" "Sync  Corrected by iscol" "BRAIN GAME" "I don't want to go down." "Nice scare, dude." "You know, we all like being scared." "Well, maybe not all of us." "On one hand, you have people going out of their way to avoid scary situations, obviously." "But then you have other people spending millions of dollars watching scary movies, reading Stephen King novels, or coming to haunted houses like Nightmare, right here in New York City." "But it turns out that a healthy dose of fear might actually help keep you alive." "Let's get back to that scare we gave you a minute ago." "Did you jump when the demon popped up?" "Ahhhh!" "If you did, that's a completely normal reaction." "But why were you scared?" "He's just an actor in makeup and latex." "There's no way he could possibly hurt you." "Ahhhh!" "Simple jump scares like this one show you just how powerful your brain's fear response is." "Fear is your brain's alarm system, triggered by sudden motions, sounds, anything that could threaten your safety or survival." "So how good is your brain at recognizing potential threats?" "It might be better than you think." "To find out, let's play a game." "Watch this series of images very closely." "Ready?" "Go." "Do you recall seeing any shoes or keys?" "Probably not." "At this speed, 80% of the people we showed this to don't see either the shoes or the keys." "We'll slow it down." "Did you see them this time?" "You probably did." "Now we're going to play a different series of images and test you on them after." "Ready?" "Go." "Did you happen to notice any snakes or spiders?" "Chances are, you did." "In case you're thinking we slowed down the images," "I assure you we did not." "All we did was substitute the shoes and keys with pictures of snakes and spiders." "Why did one set of images jump out at you while the other didn't?" "To answer that question is Dr. Kamran Fallahpour, an expert on the psychological effects of fear." "Your brain scans these spiders and snakes much faster because to our ancestors, these animals were a threat." "Your brain has evolved to recognize them, because from an evolutionary point of view, it would help our survival." "So what's going on in your brain that allows you to spot these threats so quickly?" "There's a part of the brain, called the amygdala that is constantly monitoring the input from your senses for signs of danger." "In many ways, the amygdala is like a smoke detector in your home." "It may sit inactive for long stretches of time, but as soon as you encounter a dangerous situation, your amygdala sounds the alarm." "As you're starting to see, it doesn't take much to set your amygdala off, any sound or image that reads as a threat can put your brain into survival mode." "And the makers of horror movies know exactly what buttons to push to trigger your amygdala for maximum effect." "Meet Producer and Director Larry Fessenden." "He's made over 20 horror films." "I think everything has the potential to be terrifying and I want to convey that to an audience so they feel as unsettled as I do." "Stop." "Pay attention." "Watch the following scenes closely." "Were you scared?" "Probably not, unless you find exercise terrifying." "Now let's watch the same scene again." "So what do you think?" "Did the scene suddenly become a whole lot scarier?" "Why does changing the music and sound effects change the entire mood of the scene?" "Music can make an otherwise charming-looking object into something menacing." "But it's not just any sound that can trigger a fear response in your brain." "We're going to play a game to show you what we mean." "And all you have to do is listen and notice how these sounds make you feel." "Ready?" "Close your eyes and listen closely." "Go!" "Okay, you can open your eyes." "How did that make you feel, maybe a little scared?" "But why are those sounds so terrifying?" "What's interesting about these high-pitched sounds is that they kind of mimic the cry of a baby in distress." "And since we are so tuned in to respond to danger to our young;" "it would be a very visceral reaction to these sounds." "With no greater threat to the species than the destruction of our young, your brain is conditioned to detect these high-pitched frequencies." "So far, we've set off your primal alarm system using basic scare techniques involving sounds and images." "While being startled might make your heart skip a beat, there's an even more intense category of fear." "A long, drawn out feeling of uneasiness known as dread." "In this next experiment, we're gonna show you just how powerful dread can be." "I should know, I was the guinea pig." "Deception specialist Apollo Robbins has created an experiment designed to maximize the feeling of dread." "When I think of fear," "I'm reminded of an old game of risk." "They would take a gun and load it with a single bullet." "They would revolve the chamber and take turns firing at their heads, until one of them backed out or." "But I don't think it's the bullet that makes Russian roulette scary." "I think it's the anticipation." "What I'm going to show you is not something for the faint of heart." "This is a real beer bottle that's not made out of sugar." "No, it's not." "So, we're going to do this as a game of chance." "Can I use that hammer there?" "Instead of a bullet," "We're going to use that." "That's pretty sharp." "The bags will act as the bullets." "One of these has a bottle inside." "The bottle has the razor sharp points." "Apollo wants us to take turns jamming our hands into bags chosen at random." "Which means one of us might smash our hand on the broken bottle." "Would you try this with me?" "What series of bad decisions did I make to get me to this point in my life?" "I don't want to smash the." "Are you crazy?" "Can you cover mine and" "I'll cover yours?" "Oh God!" "Jason if you would, please choose one of the bags." "Now go and hold up your left hand like this." "I'm uh, how hard are you going to push down?" "If you do this slowly, if you watch here," "Yea." "Put your hand above, like this." "Oh God!" "One, two and three." "I don't know if I want to play this game." "Okay, um, let's use my left hand." "Go ahead." "Hold you like that." "Okay, ready?" "Uh, one last choice, this is 50/50." "We'll do it together." "So we've done one each in both of our hands." "Can you just grab hold of my wrist and pull that down?" "We'll just put your hand underneath." "Oh c'mon!" "No!" "All right." "No, no, no." "One, two, three." "Oh God!" "Okay." "Oh God!" "Ugh!" "Okay, clearly that was a really intense experience for me, but why?" "Obviously the rational side of me knew I wasn't in danger." "I knew Apollo wouldn't let me get hurt, but along the way he provided very powerful visual and descriptive cues that really built up my dread." "All these moments that Apollo constructed caused my brain to second-guess my rational thinking that" "I was safe." "When he clamped his hand on mine and I knew it was too late to turn back, powerful chemical changes started taking place in my body." "My brain triggered the release of adrenaline and other stress hormones, causing those classic fear symptoms like sweaty palms and that tingling sensation that runs down your spine." "While you probably won't find yourself forced to play Russian roulette with Apollo, there are many instances in your daily life where you experience dread." "For many, boarding a plane, walking down a deserted street at night, or even the sound of a dentist's drill can trigger this biological fear response." "In fact, research has shown that the same area of your brain that is active when you're in pain also lights up when you're experiencing dread." "If just thinking about this is causing you dread and making you feel like your brain is working against you, we're about to show how your brain is actually looking out for you." "Stop." "Pay attention." "You're about to go on a scavenger hunt in a haunted house." "See if you can spot the following objects hidden in the rooms." "Look out for the palm tree, rubber chicken, crown, photograph, rat, guitar, watermelon, nametag, and bride and groom." "Ready?" "Go." "Please help me, please help me." "Won't you be quiet, please?" "I just need to examine you;" "I'm just going to look at you." "Agh, agh!" "Mommy he's hurting me!" "Get out of my house!" "Get out!" "So how did you do?" "How many items did you spot?" "Here's where they were." "With hundreds of objects in your line of sight during this 30-second tour, why were you able to remember any of these?" "The latest research shows that the answer lies in your brain's fear and emotional processing center." "When fear or heightened emotion is activated at a conscious or even subconscious level, as the haunted house tour did for many of you, it causes your amygdala to make your memory hyper-aware." "You don't even have to know that your brain is in this emotional state for it to work." "You may have noticed this happening if you've ever received shocking news or been in an accident." "When that happens, time seems to slow down and your brain acts like a camera, recording every detail." "Do you remember where you were during 9/11?" "If you do, that's because the shock of the event caused the memory to be imprinted into your brain." "These types of memories are known as flashbulb memories and they happen for a very good reason." "It's no accident that our memory gets more robust during a fearful situation." "Our brain is trying to help us not only to survive that moment, but it's also trying to create a catalogue of certain cues within this event that it needs to watch out for in the future." "So if your brain can actually help you predict something bad that's going to happen before it actually happens, then it can help you survive." "By now you should have a better understanding of why fear causes sweaty palms or that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, as well as how fear has helped us survive as a species." "And you've seen the difference between fear and dread, but there's a third response that can happen and it's what we call anxiety." "Anxiety can occur whenever you are unable to confirm whether a threat is false or real." "And your imagination begins running through worst-case scenarios." "Put simply, your brain's default setting when it comes to the unknown is." "We're setting up an experiment to see how anxious we can make a group of volunteers and to help us;" "we've enlisted the help of John Harlacher, co-director of one of New York's scariest haunted houses." "We are going to take some volunteers, and put them one by one into a pitch-black room where they can't see anything." "There, we will manipulate them, using some of the brain's most primal, hard-wired fears." "Think about being a primitive human living in a cave." "It's pitch black out." "You hear a noise." "You don't want to investigate because, who knows what's out there." "With limited sensory input, all you can really do is sit and wait as your imagination runs wild." "The dark room experiment we're about to run is going to create a situation very similar to that primitive cave." "So let's meet our participants." "Rina." "Never see horror movies or anything like that." "You never see horror movies, okay." "No." "Brian." "How do you feel?" "All right." "And Richie." "You should be all right." "That's because I don't know what's going on." "We started tapping into their basic fears right in the waiting room." "The blackout goggles and the white noise headphones create a sense of isolation." "Strapping them to the wheelchair took away all sense of control." "We're shutting down their ability to use most of their senses, in an effort to see if their own imaginations are enough to get their heart rates pumping." "Will any of them make it through?" "Or will their anxiety get the best of them?" "I want out!" "Our volunteers can't see, can't move, can't hear and they're starting to freak out." "It's not comfortable." "It's not comfortable?" "No, no, no, no!" "Turn on the lights!" "Too scary?" "Yeah." "Can't do it?" "Nope." "You don't want to push through?" "Nope." "One of our participants is so scared she's insisting on stopping immediately." "My heart was racing very fast." "Being moved in the chair for some reason," "I don't know, it made me feel helpless." "Here's what happened to Rina." "When your amygdala sounds the fear alarm, your brain releases a rush of adrenaline and diverts blood to your muscles in order to fuel what's known as the fight or flight response." "By quitting the experiment," "Rina demonstrated a classic flight response." "Rina must have a wild imagination, because we told her she was going to be scared and put her in the chair and she imagined such terrible things were going to happen to her that she didn't even let herself go into the darkroom." "Her mind scared her." "If Rina was scared in the waiting room, there's no way she could handle what else we had in store." "The first volunteer to actually make it into the dark room is Brian." "Once inside, we gave him an up-close and personal look at the bugs." "Ugh!" "And a rat." "Ah, ah!" "But everything is not as it seems to be." "And in a minute, we'll let you in on a little secret." "But first, let's take a look at Brian's reaction when he feels the creatures crawling all over his body." "Ughh aghhh,!" "Now let's see what happens when we throw a snake in his lap." "Ugh, , , ughh!" "Unlike Rina," "Brian chose the other half of fight or flight." "His reaction to fear is an aggressive reaction." "He was trying to fight the fear." "But fight isn't the f word that" "Brian is choosing to use." ", ,!" "Ah!" "While Rina fled and Brian lashed out," "Richie appears as cool as a cucumber." "That's because along with fight or flight, there is a third response." "Freezing." "Nothing we did seemed to affect him from the control room." "He's like an animal playing dead." "You might think being frozen in fear is a sign of weakness;" "an inability to react to a scary situation." "But it's actually a biologically engrained survival technique that helps you go unnoticed by predators." "For the final stage, we are leaving them in the dark for long stretches, letting their anxiety build." "At this point, they are in such a heightened state of fear;" "we don't have to do anything to scare them." "Turn on the lights!" "We had absolutely no control." "I was freaked out." "The anticipation is what did it for me." "That's the scariest part of anything." "So here's that little secret we mentioned." "We never put bugs or rats or snakes on anyone." "Ah,!" "There were only pistachio nuts," "Ah!" "Funny gloves and some rope." "And what this proves is how easy it is to trigger your fear response." "This served us well in ancient times, when threats were abundant, but in today's safer modern society, it can be harmful." "And here's why." "Your brain is still operating on the incorrect assumption that every fear situation you face is a matter of life or death." "As a result, your brain tends to overreact to trivial, non-life-threatening situations, causing you to experience undue anxiety." "The next time you're gripped with fear, you have to ask yourself, are you really in danger?" "Or is it all in your mind?" "We all know the bad parts of fear, but there is a positive side as well." "Fear of death and destruction is what keeps us awake at night thinking about ways to make things better." "If we didn't fear the disease, we would never invent the cure." "Fear of the Russians put a man on the moon." "Fear of the dark invented the light bulb." "Fear of no future will cause us to ensure the certainty of our future." "The day mankind stops being afraid, now that's something to be scared of." "Ahhhh!"