why do i feel like i am being electrocuted

This is the first time that the effect of uncertainty on stress has been quantified, but the concept is likely to be familiar to many people. We saw exactly the same effects in our physiological measures - people sweat more and their pupils get bigger when they are more uncertain.'

It turns out that it's much worse not knowing you are going to get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won't. 'Our experiment allows us to draw conclusions about the effect of uncertainty on stress. 'Using our model we could predict how stressed our subjects would be not just from whether they got shocks but how much uncertainty they had about those shocks,' explains lead author Archy de Berker (UCL Institute of Neurology). This uncertainty matched the stress levels reported by participants, which was also tracked using measurements of pupil dilation and perspiration. Participants' uncertainty that any individual rock would have a snake under it was estimated from their guesses using a sophisticated computational model of learning. Over time they learned which rocks were most likely to harbour snakes, but those odds changed throughout the experiment, generating fluctuating levels of uncertainty. They had to guess whether or not there would be a snake, and when there was they received a mildly painful electric shock on the hand.

The experiment involved 45 volunteers who played a computer game in which they turned over rocks that might have snakes under them. People whose stress levels tracked uncertainty more closely were better at guessing whether or not they would receive a shock, suggesting that stress may inform judgements of risk. The study, published in Nature Communications, found that situations in which subjects had a 50% chance of receiving a shock were the most stressful while 0% and 100% chances were the least stressful.

Why do i feel like i am being electrocuted