This Newton haunted house uses science to scare you
Lisa Feldman Barrett knows what scares you.
For the last 10 years Barrett, a neuroscientist who heads the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab at Northeastern and Massachusetts General Hospital, and her family have created a haunted house in the basement of their home in Newton, according to a report by WBUR.
But the haunted house — open just one night a year — doesn’t use gore to scare its visitors.
Instead Barrett uses science.
With help from her colleagues, the tricks in the haunted house have been developed with your brain’s reactions in mind.
“You can be really artful about how you scare people without a lot of gore,’’Barrett told WBUR. “And I thought, well, who better to do that than a lab that studies the science of emotion? We can use research to predict what the effects will be, to make it super-scary without a lot of blood and guts.’’
Barrett and her colleagues know, for example, that something is scarier when you see it out of the corner of your eye.
Or that lowering expectations can create a bigger surprise or scare.
“What your brain is doing is making predictions based on past experience,’’ Barrett told WBUR. “So if we set up things to look really kitschy at the beginning, with a lot of props, your expectation is, ‘This is going to be pretty lame, this is not going to be very scary.’ And when you walk in, we will violate that expectation.’’
The haunted house, open tonight from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., has three scare levels: no scares, middle scary, and super scary. Proceeds are donated to the Greater Boston Food Bank.
Listen to the full WBUR story here.
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