A new study was just published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) which has demonstrated technology with a particular VR platform can deliver peak experiences, ego attenuation, and connectedness comparable to psychedelics. The study, written by Dr. David Glowacki and colleagues, is ground breaking in the field, and is the first of its kind to be published in a leading peer-reviewed journal.

Study Title: Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics

The main logic behind the study was aimed at demonstrating that some of the benefits of psychedelics can be obtained in VR without the use of drugs, since the vast array of mushroom based psychedelics are illegal is most regions (so far). This study will undoubtably make ripples in the industry, as it’s the first to demonstrate that you can test the benefits of psychedelics on treating mental health conditions, including end-of-life distress and major depressive disorder.

A large portion of university research institutions are unable to adequately obtain funding and approval to test psychedelics. If we are able to test these benefits of psychedelics with VR, then a larger pool of researchers are able to tackle the important mental health questions.

Importantly, this study also demonstrates that the research of mushroom based psychedelics are no longer in their infancy. It shows that because so many studies around the world have validated the incredible benefits of psychedelics on mental health, researchers are scrambling to find alternatives ways to test this. This proves, mushroom research has reached a new level of acceptance in the academic community.

Glowacki, D.R., Williams, R.R., Wonnacott, M.D. et al. Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics. Sci Rep 12, 8995 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z

What are peak Experiences, ego attenuation, and connectedness?

Peak Experiences

In psychology, peak experiences are often described as transcendent moments of pure joy and elation. These moments are more encoded deeper in long term memory because they stand out from everyday events. The memory of such events is lasting and people often liken them to a spiritual experience, as well as out of body experiences.

CONNECTEDNESS

In psychology, Connectedness refers to the belief that people can connect to their environment and others, beyond their self. This phenomenon of connectedness is said to happen when they are not within each other’s physical presence. Another way to look at it is by the degree in which individuals experience the people and places in their lives as personally meaningful connections.

Below is a video that explain in great detail these concepts.

The Study

Below are the findings, directly from the study. I will summarize the findings below as well.

The aim of the work described herein was to determine whether the unique affordances of multi-person distributed VR can be used to reliably elicit intense STEs. Within this paper, we have described Isness-D, an experience we have developed to blur conventional self-other boundaries using the unique affordances of distributed multi-person VR. Built on a matter-energy narrative, Isness-D enables groups of participants distributed across the world to co-habit a shared virtual space and collectively experience their bodies as luminous energetic essences with soft spatial boundaries. It encourages participants to imagine themselves, others, and the world around them as unfolding interconnected processes which are energetic (rather than fixed material entities). This fluid energetic representation enables participants to undergo moments of ‘energetic coalescence’, a new class of embodied intersubjective experience whereby participants can have an embodied experience of including multiple others within their self-representation. To evaluate Isness-D, we adopted a ‘citizen science’ approach, coordinating a network of nodes distributed around the world to run multiple Isness-D sessions. This strategy enabled us to carry out this research amidst COVID related social distancing constraints. As a distributed approach, it was difficult to prime Isness-D participants in a controlled way. Nevertheless, analysis of Isness-D participant scores on four different self-report scales commonly used to assess YD experiences overwhelmingly suggest that the phenomenological intensity of STEs which arose for participants during Isness-D is comparable to previously published YD studies, in both naturalistic and laboratory settings. Isness-D enables participants to dissolve their sense of self in the connection to others, relaxing attachment to egoic identity and facilitating a strong sense of connectedness. For many participants, Isness-D offered a sense of intimacy, innocence, playfulness, and purity, eliciting a state of calm spaciousness. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to analyze a distributed multi-person VR experience using measurement scales which are typically applied to YD experiences. These results demonstrate that distributed VR can be used to elicit intersubjective STEs which simultaneously attenuate egoic identity and facilitate a sense of connectedness. This study reaffirms the ideas in our previous work25, where we speculated that it is possible to design phenomenology and experiences using numadelic technologies like multi-person VR to create the conditions for STEs from which participants derive insight and meaning. Distributed intersubjective VR experiences like Isness-D may have a role to play in easing unprecedented feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fear that have arisen with COVID restrictions. In future work, we hope to explore in futher detail the mechanisms responsible for the results obtained during Isness-D, and also carry out detailed follow-ups with participants in order to understand its impacts over the longer term.

What does it mean?

Well, the study basically showed that group VR experiences produced scores that were statistically comparable to recently published studies using moderate doses of mushroom based psychedelics. For example, participants in the Isness experiences reported feeling closer to other participants, feeling a diminished sense of ego, and having peak experiences as measured by the MEQ during their VR journeys.

Taken together, this research showed that some of the benefits of psychedelics may be achievable without using various mushroom based psychedlics. Instead, the same streams of research could in fact use cutting-edge virtual reality technology.

“We’re very excited about the possibilities of this technology for allowing people to have peak experiences and dissolve their sense of self without drugs,”

said Dr. Glowacki, lead author and Researcher at the Centro Singular de Investigacíon en Technoloxías Intelixentes in Santiago de Compestela, Spain.

A final Thought

Research conducted in the last decade suggests that psilocybin has the potential to treat substance use disorders, including alcoholism and nicotine addiction, as well as depression and anxiety. More recent studies have shown that psilocybin can actually treat far more mental health issues than what was previously thought. It has shown that research on psychedelics has also demonstrated benefits for treating end-of-life distress and major depressive disorder.

However, these drugs are not currently legal in most regions of the world. If some of the benefits of psychedelics can be achieved by using VR, then this new study has the potential to open the door to a whole new world of possibilities in the fight against the global mental health crisis.

Addition: The Method they used:

(A.i) shows 4 participants + 1 facilitator joining Isness from various ‘nodes’ distributed across the world. Participants are kneeling at the edge of their space and are represented in-world as energetic essences connected by a tangible dynamical molecular thread (which they ‘hold’ in their hands). (A.ii) shows participants undertaking ‘energetic coalescence’. Standing at the center of their respective mats, their energetic bodies overlap as they occupy the same position in the shared virtual space. The pattern on the floor in (A.i) and (A.ii) shows how participants’ local ‘play spaces’ were oriented within the virtual space. (B.i) & (B.ii) show IOS diagrams corresponding to (A.i) and (A.ii), for analogy with Fig. 1. (C) shows the international Isness ‘node’ locations as circular markers labelled with the total number of nodes in that location. There were 5 nodes in the San Francisco Bay Area (USA), 1 node in Tennessee (USA), 1 node in Massachusetts (USA), 6 nodes in Bristol (UK), and 1 node in London (UK). The Isness server was mounted on data centers D in London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) and Washington D.C (USA). ————–

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