 We already live in a constructive reality, so the idea that we could create a virtual environment that is as real or less real is a complicated question because just because it's virtual doesn't mean it's not real, given enough complexity of the stimuli, it could be indistinguishable. Right now we're inside a computer program. Is it really so hard to believe? This isn't real. Real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Somebody will appear on that rooftop and fire an RPG at your vehicle. Virtual reality exposure therapy is a method whereby you take somebody with an anxiety disorder and you gradually expose them to what they're afraid of. With post-traumatic stress disorder we're taking people that have been traumatized and we're trying to help them to confront and process these difficult emotional experiences. In a graduated way, at a pace they can handle and if they stay with it long enough, because nothing really bad happens, eventually the anxiety starts to extinguish. As soon as you get into one of those environments that you recognize, it immediately brings you back. Those experiences are very deep and they mean a lot and so when you're able to be put into that situation again, that's a pretty powerful sensation. When you tell people what you do, a lot of times it gives me a funny look like, why the hell would you do that? Why are you torturing these service members, making them go through it all over again? My answer is really simple, we do it because it works. That is pretty incredible. Neuroplasticity is the phenomena by which our brains modify itself in response to interactions with the environment. Plasticity has no morality, it will go in a direction that the interactions take it. So if your interactivity leads to a negative outcome, there is certainly the danger that they could have a negative impact on people's psychology. There's a fairly robust literature that scientists largely agree upon that if you play violent video games for many hours a week, you will be more aggressive in the physical world. What remains to be seen is when these experiences become more immersive. So you're playing a game like Grand Theft Auto and the blood splatters and you feel it hit your body and there's haptic feedback that when a body falls on you it actually knocks you over. I think an important question that people need to ask is what happens when people have these very violent experiences that the brain treats as real? We want to do the opposite. If you give someone a VR experience that's very intense but instead of killing somebody, they're saving someone's life, will that experience transfer? With the hero study, you literally become a hero and you become superwoman or superman by using your body to fly around. The wind is rushing through your hair, the floor is shaking, you then save a child's life. The control condition is maybe you're rode in a helicopter. When you fly like a hero and save a child's life, you're more helpful to someone that has an accident outside of VR compared to if you didn't get that gift of having a superpower and using it for good. And the same way a single experience in your lifetime can be transformational, so can a well-crafted virtual reality experience. Yeah, I mean, it's a long-standing philosophical issue that was raised way before movies like The Matrix, although you see a lot of that there and that's why I think it's a Hollywood favorite. While there may be some things that people have questions about with virtual reality, will people become addicted to it and so on, I think the good that will come out of this far outweighs the bad. We see the virtual reality landscape as an exciting potential for therapeutics to improve the functioning of the human brain and hopefully to improve the quality of human life. There's ways that we can experience things, we can practice interactions with virtual people, ways that we can see things that we've never seen before or never will see. You know, this technology stands to open up a world that we can only imagine at this point. Virtual reality is like uranium. It can eat homes and it can destroy nations. It's up to us to responsibly understand the effects of using these media and just to go in with full awareness of how these experiences will change us. It does question a lot of the core assumptions we have of what it is to interact in reality in the first place.