“What happens in VR is that sense of completely forgetting about the existence of the external world,” says Agnieszka Sekula, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Human Psychopharmacology in Australia and a cofounder of a company that uses VR to enhance psychedelic therapy. Then I remembered that oceans and thousands of miles separated me from them-and wasn’t ditching the notion of personal space the whole point? So I tried to settle into the intimacy. Related StoryĪs we inched nearer, I worried about infringing upon the other participants’ personal space. (“We had some physics models lying around for how to simulate its motion in real time,” Glowacki explains.) At the start, we were instructed to hold the thread and state something we wanted to connect to better, as if we were infusing it with this intention. The only object in the barren landscape was a “molecular thread”-a long string of one of the simplest amino acids, alanine, which wiggled with lifelike spontaneity. Looking down at where my hands should have been, I saw two dull lights, which I could brighten by pressing the controller I held in each hand. The landscape surrounding us was sparse and gray, with a sky that reminded me of the moment before dawn. The three other participants in my Isness-D session-who tuned in from Portugal, Italy, and California-were already arranged in a circle facing one another by the time I arrived. Last week, I decided to try Isness-D for myself. 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. Participants’ responses were then compared with those given in published, double-blind psychedelics studies.įor all four metrics, Isness-D elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics. Communitas is defined as an experience of intense shared humanity that transcends social structure. 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. 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.”įor their paper, Glowacki and his collaborators measured the emotional response Isness-D elicited in 75 participants. Meditation can also help people reach self-transcendence. The overview effect-the feeling astronauts reliably report after seeing Earth from space-creates a sense of connection with humanity as a whole. Near-death experiences like Glowacki’s often momentarily blur the boundaries of the self. There are many routes to a self-transcendent experience. During such an experience, a deep feeling of unity with other people or your surroundings allows you to expand your self-concept to include them. What marks a self-transcendent experience is the dissolution of our typical self-definition as a discrete individual, separate from other people and the environment. Glowacki was interested in using VR to produce something psychedelics reliably elicit-what’s known as a “self-transcendent experience.” In psychedelic clinical trials, people who report more intense feelings of self-transcendence typically also see the most significant symptom improvements. Getting lost in a great book could be considered a weak one the ego death that high doses of psychedelics can induce is on the opposite end. Self-transcendent experiences exist on a spectrum. But he was interested in using VR to produce something psychedelics reliably elicit-what’s known as a “self-transcendent experience.” Glowacki didn’t design Isness-D with the goal of replicating a psychedelic trip. The FDA designated psilocybin as a “breakthrough therapy” for severe depression in 2019, fast-tracking its approval process. Clinical trials incorporating these drugs, which have resurged after being shuttered in the 1970s, have demonstrated that psychedelic-assisted therapy is remarkably good at alleviating symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, which have standard treatments that fail many. Psychedelics are a class of drugs unified by their ability to alter sensory perception and change the way we process information. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience. 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.
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