Anticipatory Neural Response

A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience found that priming test subjects with a virtual simulation in which they’re surrounded by clearly sick avatars triggered an immune response in those subjects.

So the 248 healthy young people who put on virtual reality headsets and encountered virtual (fake) people who were coughing, had rashes, and displayed other sorts of potentially infectious traits, showed a spike in their innate lymphoid cell activity, which is a fundamental component of the human immune response.

The response was most dramatic in people who were closest to the obviously contagious avatars, and the response was measurable within a few hours of that simulated exposure.

The researchers behind this study wanted to see if what’s called the anticipatory neural response—which basically means our brains noticing and making predictions about things, and then preparing our bodies accordingly—might be triggerable using fake infection vectors.

Our brains seem to do this in real life, too, though in some cases they’re too late: our immune systems go into overdrive, ready to fight possible infections, only after we’ve encountered a real-deal sick person and their germs.

This research suggests that it might be possible to prime our immune systems before we encounter infectious people by simulating that experience, which could be useful in high-risk contexts (for medical staff or during a pandemic, for instance).

It also raises the possibility that we might be able to stimulate other psychological and physiological cascades (like those related to stress or anxiety) by activating the brain’s anticipatory neural response in a safe (perhaps even guided) context, allowing folks to prime themselves for uncomfortable social situations or to face their phobias, which could in turn make facing (and tempering) those discomforts and fears easier in the future.