AsianScientist (Jan. 26, 2015) – I catch the telltale scurry of legs out of the corner of my eye, and my heart sinks. I force myself to investigate, but the cockroach has somehow, disturbingly, disappeared back into the walls. Knowing that it is lying in wait, ready to beetle out again the moment my guard is down, I have trouble falling asleep.
I’ll be the first to admit that my fear of cockroaches is completely illogical. After all, I work on what Bill Gates has called the world’s deadliest animal—the mosquito. Cockroaches, in comparison, don’t feed on blood or vector any diseases—the worst they could give you, other than nightmares, is food poisoning. And yet, I have been trapped in rooms because a cockroach decided to park itself in the doorway, between me and the can of insecticide. My idea of the ultimate horror flick? Joe’s Apartment.
What doesn’t kill you….
Since misery loves company, I was pleased to discover that there are apparently enough roach-haters out there to merit a term for this condition—katsaridaphobia, or the irrational fear of cockroaches. As is the case for many phobias, treatment typically involves exposure therapy, where sufferers are gradually habituated to roaches until they lose their fear of them. This could involve talking about them, looking at photographs, and eventually handling pinned and live specimens.
Sounds good? I cannot imagine signing up. Indeed, although exposure therapy is generally effective, the dropout rate is high, presumably because it takes a lot of courage (or perhaps desperation) to confront your worst fears, particularly those of the six-legged variety.
Luckily, there may be a solution in the works—Spanish researchers have developed an augmented reality exposure therapy for cockroach phobia, using a headset and motion tracking cameras to project virtual cockroaches onto the hands of patients.
Six women with debilitating katsaridaphobia—one wanted to sell her apartment after seeing a roach—were asked to watch the computer-generated roaches swarming over their hands for between one and three hours. By the end of the session, and for up to twelve months afterwards, they were able to perform a task that I would pay good money to avoid: Walk into a room containing a live cockroach in a container, open the container, and stick your fingers in it for a few seconds. Alas, exposure therapy via fantasy cockroaches isn’t available to the public as yet, and so I must continue to rely on the kindness of friends and family to rescue me from the real ones.
Get your own cockroach cyborg
Despite my hatred of cockroaches, I’ve been morbidly fascinated by a product called the RoboRoach, which is being marketed by the company Backyard Brains as “the world’s first commercially available cyborg.” Developed by scientists as an educational tool to get kids interested in neuroscience, the kit allows users to remotely control the movement of a cockroach with a smartphone app, which sends electrical impulses over Bluetooth to the insect’s brain via its antennae.
Although the instructional video ranks right up there with Joe’s Apartment, I watched every second of it for the purposes of this column (it was also pretty good exposure therapy). A cyborg upgrade for your cockroach involves rather elaborate surgery: Briefly, you anesthetize your chosen roach by dunking him in ice water. Then, you sandpaper his back to take off the waxy substance that makes him so slippery, and superglue three electrodes in place. You then pierce his thorax with a needle and insert a wire that puts the first electrode in contact with his body fluid. Next, you snip off large sections of both antennae, and insert wires from the other two electrodes into each one. The roach is then given a day to recover before you glue on the backpack that will receive signals from your phone as you steer by swiping left or right with your finger.
Still with me? Good. Hopefully your cockroach is too.
The scientist in me appreciates that the RoboRoach is a great way to get young people excited about neuroscience. I’m also aware that scientists manipulate insects and animals for research purposes all the time. But I still can’t help but feel repulsed by the idea; perhaps it’s the clever marketing and the slick phone app interface, or the fact there that there really isn’t a clearly defined experimental goal that would justify subjecting roaches to the surgery.
Also, given that the vast majority of users aren’t going to be experts on cockroach anatomy, I’m guessing there will be many more botched surgeries than successful ones. While using the kit, parents and teachers might be wise to initiate a discussion about the ethics of using animals for education, and of controlling an animal’s behavior.
In case you were wondering, surviving RoboRoaches can be retired after use and apparently function pretty normally, living out the rest of their days eating and making baby roaches despite missing both antennae and perhaps the odd leg or two. I’m actually happy for them—as long as I don’t have to look at them.
This article is from a monthly column called The Bug Report. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: rromer/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
