Doctor Real

Dr. Real was the original explorer of Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT). In 1959, Gethroe Real worked in the CIT laboratory of Dr. Emanual Kould. His senior research project involved high definition color television. After obtaining his MD in 1965, Dr. Real began using a virtual reality television-based system to treat Vietnam War combat stress victims. In 1980, Dr. Real constructed his first computer-based VRT terminal using a NorthStar PC modified with a custom color monitor. In 1984 Dr. Real released his home VRT software (MacReal) and began world-wide VRT therapy via modem connections to patient homes. In 1992 internet VRT began with the release of Dr. Real's netReality interface. The latest version is iReality version 10.4 for the Tiger OS. Dr. Real is an advisor for many reality TV shows. Feel free to leave a comment or question for Dr. Real:

=Tell me what's wrong.=

I have never watched a reality T.V. show
Doctor Real Replies: There is nothing wrong with you that a little RLS wiki won't fix.

The Laboratory
If Dr. Real is not seeing patients in his office, he is often in the lab.

Dr. Real Discusses his current research
"I have spent several decades thinking about the difference between reality and fantasy. Sometimes the differences seem as great as the difference between night and day, but other times, if we re-focus our thinking, the boundaries blur. Note: all of your fantasies are produced by the material of your brain. Fantasies are physically real....we simply make a distinction between what thoughts originate inside our brain and what thoughts reflect something from outside. Is it simple to make this distinction? For a healthy brain it should be."

"What happens if a brain malfunctions and fails to distinguish fantasy from reality? There are two ways this can happen: first, you might think that something outside of your brain is only something you are imagining. Second, you might decide that part of your internal mental fantasy world exists outside your brain, when in fact it does not. We call these conditions, if chronic and disruptive to life, "reality assignment disorders". "The major cause of reality assignment disorders is based on the fact that everything we know about the world is represented as a virtual reality inside our brain. That virtual reality thus contains two major categories of representations, corresponding to either


 * 1) what reflects the reality that is outside the brain
 * and
 * 2) what is only inside the brain.

"But if both types of representation are produced by the same brain processes, how do we distinguish between them? What marks the difference between fantasy and reality within our thoughts?. The answer is tricky because it involves qualia."

"Qualia are the "feels" that distinguish different thoughts. Here is an experiment in qualia: look at the first image with the apples. Does this animation show one apple or two different items- a red apple and a green apple? If you are looking at the image, you probably first see a red apple and then a green apple. This is how most people see it because we are not used to an apple rapidly changing colors." "If you look at the second image, you can imagine that it is one apple that changes colors. In either case, if you have normal color vision, the redness of the apple produces a quale in your brain. That "redness quale" allows you to distinguish a red apple from a green apple or it can let you have the concept that a green apple can turn red."

"Returning to the problem of distinguishing reality from fantasy, we can hypothesize that thoughts about reality have an associated "reality quale" while thoughts about fantasies have a "fantasy quale". This may be most familiar to you in terms of dreams. For most people, experiences generated during a dream usually have a different "feel" than experiences from normal waking consciousness.

"There are some stroke victims who have lost the ability to see colors. From this observation, we conclude that there are specific parts of the brain that generate color qualia. Similarly, certain parts of the brain function to provide our normal ability to make reality assignments. These special brain regions generate our fantasy qualia and our reality qualia. Research in my laboratory is currently identifying these brain regions. We hope to discover drugs that can modulate the behavior of these brain regions and help patients who have Reality Assignment Disorders.

House calls
Dr. Real does make house calls.