This is some real life Jaws stuff.
Growing up in the southeast, seeing a great white shark was basically like seeing a unicorn…
It just ain’t happening.
Seriously, it’s hard to even imagine that there are creatures out there this massive that occasionally make their way to the top of the ocean.
This wild video comes from Stanford professor Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab, whose team of researchers were out on the Pacific Ocean to:
“Collect footage of great white sharks for a fear/anxiety VR stimulus.”
So, what better way to get a great white all riled up than to throw some tuna out as bait?
But that’s not what happened here.
They were actually planning on catching a tuna to eat for dinner, rather than intentionally throwing out some chunks out into the water hoping to entice a shark for their study. But either way, it resulted in some of the wildest great white shark footage I’ve ever seen.
You can see the massive great white at the surface, absolutely obliterating the tuna the researchers had on the line.
“We wanted tuna for our dinner and we had one on the line… we were expecting a (meal) reward. A local great white reminded us that, when they are around, humans eat last.
However, the reward of seeing it breach was greater than the meal we would’ve had.”
I’m not sure if you could script this any better.
If a “fear/anxiety VR stimulus” is what they were looking for, they got every last bit of it, because this video will get your blood pumping in a heartbeat.
However, that wasn’t necessarily all they got, they got a rush of dopamine and a memory to last a lifetime.
Huberman put things in perspective in the caption when he said:
“I’ll also never forget that incident because when we get a big and unexpected release of dopamine, it leaves an indelible mark on our memory.
You can start to see why dopamine is so fundamental to the evolution of every species. It’s the chemical currency that tells us about the value of our experiences and efforts.”
I’d say.
Check it out:
