Pixels & Psychedelics: How VR is Enhancing Psychedelic Therapy
Fasten your VR headsets, we're about to take a trip deep into the frontier of psychedelic therapy with PhD Zeus Tipado 🎮🍄
Virtual reality is making its way into the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy at a breakneck pace. We’re only in the early stages of research, but the results so far are nothing short of astounding.
We were skeptical at first, but there are some real tangible advantages to this combo:
Standardizing Setting
Creating Custom Trip Settings
Attending Virtual Retreats
Improving Mindset Before a Trip
Helping Users Prepare for the Psychedelic Experience
Nobody is looking into virtual reality and psychedelics like Zeus Tipado (@tipado) — a doctoral candidate at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Tipado and his team are examining the effects of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) combined with extended-reality (XR) on the brain.
XR systems incorporate VR along with noise-canceling headphones and other modes of interaction.
This may involve a moving platform so you can "walk" through your environment, haptic feedback (vibrations) to accompany your interactions within the virtual environment, and more.
I recently had the good fortune to speak with Tipado about his research, what led him to it, and where he thinks it might be going.
Here’s what he had to say on the topic:
Zeus Tipado On Solving Psychedelic Riddles With VR At Maastricht University
I'm the only person in the world administering DMT and VR in a clinical study. It's big!
Zeus isn’t blowing smoke here. Until now, psychedelics and VR have existed almost exclusively within a theoretical framework.
While actual research is scarce, scientists have released conceptual articles on:
As of yet, none of these studies have extensive research behind them, and — despite the excitement laid out in conceptual studies — very little is currently underway to investigate the use of VR in psychedelic therapy.
Zeus and his team are seeking to change that.
Here’s what they’re working on…
First, participants in the study take a dose of DMT while using an XR setup Tipado’s team created.
They’re connected to a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain scan which is a non-invasive technique that uses protons to detect minute changes in the brain.
Zeus can explain it to you better than I could:
Unlike other methods of scanning activity in the brain, fNIRS fits comfortably over the participant’s head, allowing for movement and leaving space for a VR headset to sit comfortably.
The short action of DMT helps ensure participants aren’t overextending their time in the virtual world and provides fast feedback on results.
Maastricht University Research on DMT & VR
When I asked Tipado what his team was looking into, he told me he couldn't share specifics, but there were many elements they were looking into.
There's a lot that I can't discuss until some papers and studies I'm doing at Maastricht University get published. However, I can mention that my line of research has never been conducted before, and I'm pretty excited to reveal to the world my findings.
Tipado would only say it was partially about “the utility of XR as a modulator of the DMT experience.” Additionally, he added they were looking at “the fundamental nature of how and, more importantly, why we trip.”
DMT is especially useful in this sense, according to Tipado, because it "guarantees a visual experience if the correct dosage is administered."
The visual experience VR provides overrides the world around users.
We’re not just talking about floors changing colors, but entire environments melting away and being replaced with new ones. In a sense, DMT is virtual reality — but just condensed into a small pile of crystals.
While he isn’t formally looking into the effects of other psychedelics with VR quite yet, Tipado did state a desire to do the same for one other drug — Salvia divinorum.
Its effects are absolutely mind-bending and reality-defining. Also, this monumental experience is short-lived, just like DMT.
Zeus Tipado’s Interest in Psychedelics & Virtual Reality
One experience Tipado classifies as an “absolutely a catalyzing moment” for his interest in psychedelics and VR was the 2017 E3 convention.
It was here — “at the time, the largest video game expo in the world” — that Tipado would consume 4–5g of magic mushrooms and go to a “shamanic virtual reality” exhibit during his peak:
The VR world I was in was cavernous, filled with giant glowing mushrooms. When I left the cave I saw a perpetually-shifting mandala hanging in the sky like a celestial body. It was suspended above a calm lake at a point that appeared to be midnight.
While this was “incredible,” Tipado has a long history of psychedelics and technology. “In fact, my master's thesis at the University of South Wales was on how technology can innervate the psychedelic experience.”
During his undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona, Tipado discovered the ethnobotanist and prolific psychedelic pioneer Terence McKenna.
He promptly “illegally downloaded as many .mp3s” as he could get his hands on.
McKenna spoke extensively about technology and psychedelics, but Tipado particularly remembers a specific moment from his 7-hour lecture, "History Ends in Green.”
The section he’s referring to starts about 2 hours and 8 minutes into the more than 7-hour lecture:
McKenna brings up the idea of incorporating VR into psychedelics. He even discusses a study design in which he uses VR and software to detect language spoken while in VR.
Colorful geometric objects would then be displayed to the person within this VR world based on what specifically is being said.
What is the Potential for Psychedelics & VR?
While Tipado and his team are the only ones studying the brain during a trip on VR, others have considered the possibility of the combination in various ways.
The main potential applications include:
Standardizing Setting — VR and XR can create reliably comfortable settings and ensure they’re consistently enjoyable.
Unique Settings — VR and XR settings offer the potential to explore unlimited possibilities with our imagination as the only limiting factor. Tripping in a dark room without any noise is cool, but what if you could play relaxing music while floating through the galaxy instead?
Virtual Reality Retreats — VR and XR can recreate the environments of psychedelic retreats to open them to the public in ecologically safe ways.
Improving Mindset — Several studies have VR to be an effective tool for anxiety, depression, and other potential concerns. VR and XR programs might be able to create consistently beneficial activities and settings to brighten a person’s mindset.
Virtual Reality and Trip Preparation — Applications could help set the tone for what people can expect when they go on their psychedelic journey. While we’ve never had a good way to explain the effects of psychedelics, maybe we can show them instead.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and several other possibilities are out there. As time goes on and our grasp on this technology grows, it's likely more potential benefits will emerge.
1. Standardizing Settings in Psychedelics With VR
Standardizing settings to help improve psychedelic trips is one of the biggest potential impacts virtual reality could have on psychedelics.
As Tipado put it,
I believe the setting has more influence on a psychedelic experience than the psychedelic itself. As we’ve seen with placebo research, non-pharmacological factors hold an immense influence on an individual.
Things like the expectancy effect can definitely shift a psychedelic in a certain direction.
Even without the addition of psychedelics, VR has already proven itself to improve a person’s outcome through a virtual setting.
One study involved two participants who had undergone amputative surgery and experienced phantom limb pain — the sensation of feeling pain in the location of a former limb.
Researchers found that hour-long sessions replicating movement in their lost limb could almost eliminate pain with each of the six sessions.
Participants reliably reduced their pain and discomfort by interacting with their limbs virtually.
Furthermore, controlling this factor enables deeper research into what goes into a healthy setting for a trip which is crucial.
As a recent study from Dr. Neşe Devenot called for, these factors need to stop being “relegated to footnotes and passing mentions.” Without a transparent understanding of every element contributing to a trip, we can’t deduce what works best.
We're only just beginning to examine this crucial element of the psychedelic experience, and VR could provide us the opportunity to do so with clinical precision.
2. Unique Settings for Psychedelic Trips Through VR
“The intriguing thing about XR is that a setting can be anything imaginable,” Tipado told me.
Our gold standard of a clean and welcoming room may fly out the window when we can experience our trip floating through galaxies we invent ourselves.
As Zeus once tweeted, “Our brains are pretty easy to hack” and it’s easy to convince our brains we’re in a completely different reality.
You could — from the safe comfort of your home — take mescaline in the desert, ayahuasca in the jungle, or mushrooms among Mayan ruins. Why limit yourself to that, though?
You could create a program where you “walk through your own mind” and interact with it as you try to incorporate the messages and themes of the trip.
Imagine peaking on acid and pulling a file out of a cabinet in the interior of your mind, labeling it with a quality you might want more of, replicating it into 10,000 copies, and filling the room with it.
Or, if you’d rather, create an alien planet filled with wildlife waiting to interact with you.
Maybe even recreate DMT entities you meet and give them the personality, voices, and understanding of all your favorite psychonautic heroes.
3. Virtual Psychedelic Retreats
I expect XR settings will eventually overtake the psychedelic retreat model. It's something I'm also heavily investigating in my research.
Since R. Gordon Wasson first betrayed the trust of Maria Sabina, tourists have flocked to shamanistic retreats abroad — often to the detriment of the communities they visit and the plants they seek.
Through XR, psychonauts can experience the joy of a traditional ceremony without having to harm the environment they wish to explore.
Surround yourself with representations of people or elements you find joy in and control the group around you. Or, perhaps, with a community of other real people joining virtually through their avatars.
We're already seeing the "metaverse" style conferences popping up — how long until this extends to psychedelic retreats?
4. Improving Your Mindset While Tripping With VR/XR
Improving your setting can go a long way in improving your mindset as well — and it doesn’t even have to involve very realistic graphics.
One study used a VR program of a snowy landscape and cold environment during the painful operation of removing dead skin cells from burn wounds.
The game — Snow World — had greatly inferior graphics to what we can accomplish today. Yet, the cool environment VR immersed patients in succeeded in reducing the painful burn of their wound care.
Another study evaluated stress levels — a common emotion during a psychedelic trip — in participants playing a stress-based game through an XR setup.
In the game, participants go through challenges revolving around their heart rate and anxiety levels. An example in the study involves patients arriving at a gate they cannot open unless they locate the tools to lower their stress first.
They found VR had “between above average and excellent” effects on stress.
In this way, VR could assist with overcoming the onset of a psychedelic experience and the uncomfortable feelings it can bring.
Participants could use programs and tools to process uncomfortable physical feelings and maintain a positive mindset throughout the trip.
5. VR for Trip Preparation
As Dr. Aday and his crew note in their 2020 study, psychedelic drugs have several parallels with each other. They state, "VR may be a useful tool for preparing hallucinogen-naïve participants in clinical trials for the sensory distortions experienced in psychedelic states.”
Both options can overwhelm our visual field and understanding of reality. Maybe, therefore, VR can empower new psychonauts to better understand the perceptual distortions they’ll face.
This could be a crucial harm-reduction measure.
Take a look at this simulation below of different dosage levels of DMT as an example:
Problems Around Researching Psychedelics & VR/XR
It's incredibly hard to get funding for my line of research. It's way less sexy to say, 'I'm trying to understand the neurological mechanisms underlying a visual psychedelic experience' than 'shrooms can help you kick an alcohol addiction.'
It's unfortunate because when I'm done with my research, I'm pretty confident I will be opening up a new pathway of psychedelic research that will yield products, services, and technology. However, investors don't invest in the journey – just the destination.
Today, the best way to get funding for research is to present a new drug, technology, or application thereof to secure years of patent rights. While there is some money to make in VR, there isn’t enough to raise the eyebrows of many research funders.
Anyone can own a decent VR setup for under a one-time $500-or-under payment. That’s a big difference from a $5,000 psychedelic therapy session or $60 a month for medication.
Issues Pairing VR & Psychedelics
Just as it’s false to think psychedelics are always safe, there are potential risks associated with VR as well.
When combining the two, over-stimulation, cyber sickness, and disorientation can turn a trip into a nightmare, even if you’re floating through cyber heaven.
Two of the biggest factors in this concern are overstimulation and the amount of time a person is exposing themselves to VR.
If you're using DMT like the participants in Tipado's study, you likely won't be using VR for very long, but ensure you take regular breaks if you're using a longer-acting psychedelic like LSD or magic mushrooms.
Overstimulation can make you feel overwhelmed and may even make you anxious or irritable. Remember, you'll have plenty of visuals on your own; a VR environment should be relaxing, enjoyable, and conducive to a relaxing time.
Drifting through space is nice enough; you don't have to make the background full of shifting mandalas and exploding colors.
Conclusions: What’s Next for Psychedelics & VR?
Tipado just put out a call for participants for a survey on visuals associated with DMT.
It will be available to everyone on the planet (that has done DMT in all forms).
Tipado also teased a paper on “psychedelic vision” dropping sometime around the beginning of summer. He said it “will introduce a new neuromechanics of tripping that I believe has been overlooked in science.”
Finally, he stated, “I’m also working on a paper regarding XR and the combination of psychedelics and a study that I’m working on with a newly-released XR headset will be completed this year.”
This is the work of a single team with the hopes others might jump on.
Currently, most of the movement in this niche space revolves around patents, app development, and other marketing ploys.
We simply do not know enough about the psychedelic experience, let alone psychedelic experiences modulated by any form of extended reality, to have an understanding of if and how this combination will assist in therapy. Especially trademarked therapy.
There needs to be a fundamental understanding of aspects of the psychedelic experience, like how it affects our ability to perceive, before we go down the rabbit hole of "psychedelics make everything better."
That is the primary focus of my research in psychedelics, XR/VR, and the brain.
As Tipado’s findings start coming to light, we’ll hope other researchers jump on this potentially invaluable tool for shaping the psychedelic experience.
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Credits & Shoutouts
Article by J Gordon Curtis
Artwork by Dikigiyat
Videos by Zeus Tipado (via Healing Maps) and Josie Kins
Edited by Justin Cooke