[Excerpts from an article in GQ; an audio interview with the author is available from NPR]

[Image: Ari Hollander/Hunter Hoffman]

Burning Man

On his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sam Brown was set on fire by an improvised explosive device. He survived, only to find himself, like thousands of other vets, doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. Even hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, and little hope.

Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland

By Jay Kirk
February 2012

[snip]

Hunter Hoffman hadn’t set out to help burn patients. As a cognitive psychologist—who had gotten his start back in the ’80s conducting experiments at Princeton to test the mind’s ability to discern between real and false memories—he had begun experimenting with virtual reality as a treatment for arachnophobes. Using a VR game he’d designed called SpiderWorld (see box), he had helped a number of individuals so crippled by fear that they had to seal up their windows to sleep. Outfitted with virtual-reality goggles, the patient began at the far end of a virtual kitchen, opposite the counter, upon which was a small, barely visible spider. Once the fight-or-flight response had subsided, the patient could inch closer until he could stand being close enough to see the spider’s reflection in the toaster’s chrome finish. Hoffman had created a world that people could enter, reemerging with their nightmares erased. It was an artificial world with the power to transform meaning itself in the so-often-insufferable sphere known as the real.

One day in 1994, a colleague of Hoffman’s told him he’d been observing patients at a burn center using hypnosis to control pain. His colleague wasn’t exactly sure how the treatment worked, but he thought it had something to do with distraction.

“Distraction?” Hoffman said. “I’ll show you distraction,” and he showed his friend SpiderWorld.

Not long after, Hoffman went to meet the hypnotist himself, who agreed VR sounded like a pretty good idea. On the very first burn patient they tried, SpiderWorld worked. He simply forgot to think about his pain. Still, stoves and toasters didn’t seem right, considering—kind of cruel, really. So Hoffman hired a world builder to make something else, something colder, fireproof. Read more on Distraction and presence in painkilling SnowWorld…