VR Is As Good As Psychedelics At Helping People Reach Transcendence
David Glowacki, an artist and computational molecular physicist, has created a VR experience called Isness-D that aims to recapture a transcendence experience he had when he fell in the mountains fifteen years ago. "[O]n four key indicators used in studies of psychedelics, the program showed the same effect as a medium dose of LSD or psilocybin (the main psychoactive component of 'magic' mushrooms)," reports MIT Technology Review. From the report: Isness-D is designed for groups of four to five people based anywhere in the world. Each participant is represented as a diffuse cloud of smoke with a ball of light right about where a person's heart would be. Participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience. [...] To create it, Glowacki took aesthetic inspiration from quantum mechanics -- as he puts it, "where the definition of what's matter and what's energy starts to become blurred." For their paper, Glowacki and his collaborators measured the emotional response Isness-D elicited in 75 participants. They based their measurements on four metrics used in psychedelics research -- the MEQ30 (a mystical experience questionnaire), the ego dissolution inventory scale, the "communitas" scale, and the "inclusion of community in self" scale. Communitas is defined as an experience of intense shared humanity that transcends social structure. Participants' responses were then compared with those given in published, double-blind psychedelics studies. For all four metrics, Isness-D elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics. On the mystical experience scale, Isness-D participants reported an experience as intense as that elicited by 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD, and stronger than that induced by microdoses of either substance. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
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