Abstract

Over the last decade, a number of studies combining psychotherapy with psychedelic drugs (PsiDs) have demonstrated positive outcomes that are often associated with PsiDs ability to induce ‘mystical-type’ experiences (MTEs) – i.e. subjective experiences whose characteristics include a sense of connectedness, transcendence, and ineffability. In recent work, Dr Glowacki set out to investigate the extent to which both PSiDs and virtual reality can be situated on a broader spectrum of psychedelic technologies.

Specifically, Glowacki et al borrowed concepts, methods, and analysis strategies from PsiD research to design and evaluate “Isness", a multi-person VR journey where participants experience the collective emergence, fluctuation, and dissipation of their bodies as energetic essences. A study (N=57) analyzing participant responses to a commonly used PsiD experience questionnaire (MEQ30) indicates that Isness participants had MTEs comparable to those reported in double-blind clinical studies after high doses of psilocybin & LSD. Within a supportive setting and conceptual framework, these results suggest that VR can be designed to create the conditions for MTEs from which participants derive insight and meaning, opening up interesting new research directions for exploring how perceptual phenomenology in VR might enable new therapeutic tools.

Biography

Dr David Glowacki is a Royal Society Research fellow, Philip Leverhulme fellow, and ERC award holder currently based at the University of Bristol, where he founded the Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL), an interdisciplinary group spanning Chemistry, Computer Science, psychology, and aesthetics, which explores the state-of-the-art boundaries for developing and applying open-source computational approaches to scientific research domains. The digital artworks produced within the IRL have been experienced by more than 200,000 people across 3 continents, and exhibited at a wide range of cultural and scientific venues.

www.glow-wacky.com