On important measures, a VR experience produced results that were
comparable to those of participants who had used medium quantities of LSD or
magic mushrooms.
David Glowacki had a severe fall while out hiking in the mountains fifteen
years ago. His lungs started to fill with blood as soon as he touched the
ground. Glowacki's area of perception widened as he lay there gasping. When
he looked down at his own body, he saw that it was made up of balled-up
light rather than his usual form.
He remembers, "I realized that the amount to which I inhabited my body was
proportional to the intensity of the light. But he wasn't afraid to watch it
in the dark. Glowacki could see that the light wasn't going out from his new
vantage point. It was changing and seeping out of his body into the
surroundings.
Glowacki had a supreme sense of serenity as a result of this understanding,
which he understood to mean that his consciousness might outlive and
transcend his physical form. He therefore pondered what may happen after
what he believed to be death.
Glowacki, a computational molecular physicist and artist, has endeavored to
reclaim that transcendence after his injury.
His most recent endeavor, Isness-D, is a VR experience. A recent study
published in Nature Scientific Reports found that the program had the same
impact on four important psychedelic research markers as a medium dosage of
LSD or psilocybin (the primary psychoactive ingredient in "magic"
mushrooms).
Isness-D is made for four to five persons in any location worldwide. Each
participant is shown as a hazy cloud of smoke with a ball of light
positioned just over the heart.
When participants assemble in one location in the virtual reality scene to
overlap their dispersed bodies, it becomes hard to distinguish where one
person begins and ends. This experience is known as energetic coalescence.
The emotions of profound connectivity and ego attenuation that follow are
similar to those that are frequently experienced during psychedelic
experiences.
Minimizing ego
The capacity of psychedelic substances to alter sensory experience and the
way we absorb information makes them a common class of medications. Clinical
trials using these drugs, which have been revived after being shut down in
the 1970s, have shown that psychedelic-assisted therapy is remarkably
effective at reducing the symptoms of addiction, depression, post-traumatic
stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, for which standard
treatments often fall short. In 2019, the FDA accelerated the approval of
psilocybin as a "breakthrough treatment" for severe depression.
Isness-D was not created by Glowacki with the intention of imitating a
psychedelic experience. But he was interested in utilizing VR to create what
is described as a "self-transcendent experience," which is something that
psychedelics routinely trigger.
Self-transcendent experiences come in a variety of forms. One may argue
that losing oneself in a good book is a stronger experience than the ego
death brought on by heavy dosages of psychedelics. People who express more
deep self-transcendence in psychedelic therapeutic studies often have the
greatest symptom relief.
Our conventional self-definition as a distinct individual, apart from other
individuals and the world, dissolves during a self-transcendent experience.
A profound sense of connectedness with others or your environment during
such an encounter enables you to broaden your conception of who you are to
include them.
Self-transcendent experiences can be attained in many different ways. The
limits of the self are frequently briefly dissolved during near-death
experiences like Glowacki's. The overview effect, which astronauts often
describe feeling after viewing Earth from orbit, fosters a sense of
interconnectedness with all of mankind. Self-transcendence can also be
attained through meditation.
There is also Isness-D. Its visual inspiration, in Glowacki's words, came
from quantum physics, "where the concept of what is matter and what is
energy starts to get muddled."
Glowacki and his associates examined the emotional reaction that Isness-D
produced in 75 individuals for their research. They employed the MEQ30 (a
mystical experience questionnaire), the ego dissolution inventory scale, the
"communitas" scale, and the "inclusion of community in self" scale as their
bases for assessment. A profound sense of our shared humanity that
transcends societal structures is known as communitas. The replies from the
participants were then compared to those from double-blind, previously
published psychedelic investigations.
Isness-D produced reactions for all four metrics that were identical to
those brought on by medium dosages of psychedelics. Isness-D participants
described mystical experiences that were more potent than those brought on
by microdoses of either drug and as intense as those brought on by 20
milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD.
My VR journey
I made the decision to give Isness-D a try last week. When I arrived, the
other three Isness-D participants—from California, Portugal, and Italy—were
already seated in a circle facing one another. The area around us was empty
and dreary, with a sky that made me think of the hour just before morning. I
saw two dim lights where my hands ought to have been when I looked down,
which I could brighten by pushing the controllers in my palms.
A "molecular thread"—a lengthy strand of alanine, one of the most basic
amino acids—was the sole thing in the desolate environment, jiggling with
realistic spontaneity. Glowacki continues, "We had some physics models
hanging around for how to approximate its movements in real time. We were
told to hold the thread at the beginning and say something we wished to
connect to more deeply, as though we were infusing it with this
purpose.
Then, much like a guided meditation, a narrator led our thoughts and
motions. The soft voice told us to move a bit closer when it was time to
energetically combine. Then, as four clumps of smoke billowing together, we
drifted even closer together until we eventually left our four corners and
united in the center of the circle.
I was concerned about invading the other participants' personal space as we
drew closer. Then I realized that there were seas and thousands of miles
between us, and that the whole point was to give up the idea of personal
space. So I made an effort to relax into the closeness.
Agnieszka Sekula, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Human
Psychopharmacology in Australia and a cofounder of a startup that employs VR
to augment psychedelic therapy, claims that what happens in VR is the
feeling of entirely forgetting about the presence of the outside world.
Therefore, there is a clear analogy between that and the feeling of being in
a different world when using psychedelics that feels more real than what is
actually there.
But she adds that "there are obviously variances" between the sensations
associated with virtual reality and psychedelic experiences. She therefore
respects that Isness-D outlines a fresh road to transcendence rather than
simply imitating one that already existed.
The long-term impacts of an Isness-D encounter and the potential
psychedelic-like effects of virtual reality in general require more study.
The prevalent view on how psychedelics improve clinical results (a topic
that is far from clear) holds that the subjective trip experience and the
drug's neurochemical effects on the brain work together to produce this
effect. Since VR simply replicates the subjective experience, it may not
have as great of a therapeutic benefit as other technologies.
University of California, San Francisco professor of psychiatry Jacob Aday
wishes the study had taken participants' mental health into account. He
believes virtual reality (VR) has the potential to reduce activity in the
default mode network, a brain network that is active when our thoughts
aren't focused on a particular task and that psychedelics may inhibit
(scientists theorize that this is what causes ego death). When viewed
encouraging films, users' participation on this network decreased. Isness-D
may lower the awe factor similarly since VR is more effective at evoking it
than traditional video.
Anyone with a VR headset may already sign up for weekly Isness sessions
thanks to the Glowacki lab-spun firm aNUma. The firm offers a comparable
experience called Ripple to assist patients, their families, and their
carers in coping with terminal illness. It also sells a condensed version of
Isness-D to businesses for virtual wellness retreats. Even in couples and
family therapy, Isness-D is being tested by one of the paper's
coauthors.
We've discovered that portraying individuals as pure brilliance frees them
from a lot of assumptions and preconceptions, according to Glowacki. This
includes biases and unfavorable views regarding their appearance. For cancer
patients and their loved ones, he personally led aNUma sessions. One died a
few days later; she had pancreatic cancer. She and her buddies were a group
of jiggling balls of light the last time they got together.
During one part of my Isness-D experience, movement left a brief electric
trail that served as a marker for my previous location. This went on for a
while before the narration inquired, "How does it feel to view the past?" I
started to consider the folks from my past that I had wounded or missed. I
wrote their names in the air in clumsy script with my finger. I saw them go
as swiftly as I could write them.
