The Neuroscience of Horror Films in Virtual Reality
The paradox begins with a simple question: how do you study the brain’s response to trauma without inflicting trauma? For decades, the answer has been controlled laboratory conditions, carefully neutral environments, and stimuli so mild they barely register as threatening. Yet Shaira Berg, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has built her career on the opposite approach. She constructs immersive horror scenarios in virtual reality, then watches how people learn and behave inside them. [2] The paradox resolves when the question is scaled: a laboratory room is not a battlefield, but a virtual world can feel like one.
Berg’s path to this unconventional method runs through Cambridge, where she completed a PhD in psychology focused on behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, UK. [3] There, she collaborated with local video-game studio Ninja Theory, a company known for immersive horror games. [4] Together, they conducted virtual reality studies examining how threat affects goal-directed learning and maladaptive habit formation in obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. The collaboration produced results published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience in 2026, showing that immersion strengthened habit-like effects while goal-directed effects remained constant across different levels of immersion. [5] Parallel work at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry has used similar VR threat paradigms to study anxiety disorders, and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have applied comparable immersive methods to fear extinction learning, pointing toward a broader shift in how threat responses are studied
The scaling principle works in both directions. At the small scale, a single VR scenario can elicit measurable behavioural responses that conventional laboratory tasks miss. At the larger scale, the same principle extends to how researchers understand conditions like OCD, where habitual responses tend to override goal-directed ones. The finding matters because it suggests that the more immersive the environment, the more clearly maladaptive habits emerge. Berg’s current work extends this approach into fear conditioning and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, still blending neuroscience with film through a collaboration with a film studio.
The Personal Becomes the Experimental
Berg is open about how her scientific pathway has been shaped by personal experience. Surviving a traumatic event during her doctoral studies altered how she thought about the limits of established research methods for studying the brain after trauma. Rather than separating that experience from her academic work, she began to explore how science and creative expression could inform one another. This is not a common trajectory in neuroscience, where personal experience is often treated as a source of bias rather than insight.
Her creative output includes Gaslight, a play based on her experience that she wrote and starred in alongside her studies. The work was nominated for an award and later adapted into a short film, which is now in development as a feature film. The trajectory from play to short film to feature film broadens her exploration of how creative forms can communicate psychological experience in ways that scientific data alone cannot. She describes herself as a cinematic neuroscientist, a tag line that captures the fusion of disciplines.
The clinical vocabulary problem drives much of her creative work. At the PhD level, she found it difficult to translate clinical terms into something people outside the field can relate to. That gap motivated her to write Gaslight, aiming to let audiences feel, even vicariously, what it is like to live through trauma. A research paper can describe a condition; a play can put an audience inside it. The overall structure is not that different: a paper has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and so does a play. The difference is whose shoes the audience occupies.
Berg has done stage and film acting since she was 12, and what always fascinated her was being able to feel things she had not necessarily felt herself and portray that truthfully. That skill translates directly into her scientific work. Throughout her PhD and current research, she has had to creatively produce fictional scenes to simulate threat behaviour. This approach generates experimental results without triggering symptoms and upsetting participants, a practical advantage that conventional methods often lack.
The Feedback Loop Between Art and Science
The relationship between Berg’s creative practice and her scientific research is not one-way. Everything she writes or directs has a neuroscience grounding, she says, describing it as a way of examining human behaviour honestly and portraying it honestly too. Conditions such as PTSD and OCD are rarely depicted in a way that is both sensitive and faithful to what the conditions actually feel like. She thought she had a way to work on both fronts at once.
The technical method at the core of her research is called Pavlovian-instrumental transfer, which examines how environmental cues associated with rewards or threats influence subsequent behaviours. For example, if someone learns that a blue symbol is associated with a reward, seeing blue while completing a different task might be associated with a positive behaviour, such as moving faster or putting in more effort. Berg used custom-built VR scenarios to study how these learnt cues affect behaviour in realistic virtual environments. The results showed that immersive conditions produced more measurable responses.
Berg believes lived experience matters enormously in neuroscience, noting that many people who end up studying a condition have some personal connection to it. Neuroscience appealed to her because it felt like a way to understand her own brain better. Studying trauma in depth helped her, in part, to process her own experiences while working towards findings that might lead to treatments for others. The immersive environments can elicit behaviours that are harder to study using conventional laboratory tasks, a finding with implications for how future trauma research is conducted.
The contradiction that remains unresolved is whether the field will accept this hybrid approach. Berg’s work demonstrates that creative production and scientific rigour can coexist productively, yet academic institutions still largely treat them as separate domains. The immersive environments she builds are expensive, time-consuming, and require skills that most neuroscience labs do not possess. Her collaborations with game studios and film studios point toward a future where such partnerships become standard, but that future has not yet arrived. The question of how to scale this approach beyond individual researchers and their studios remains open, as does the question of whether funding bodies will support work that straddles disciplines so visibly. For now, Berg continues to build bridges between worlds that rarely speak to each other, one virtual scenario and one film frame at a time.
Sources
2. University of Texas at Austin
4. Ninja Theory