Virtual reality (VR) and psychedelics have more in common than you probably think. Aside from the trippy visuals and ability to transport you (or at least your imagination) to different places, the two also share similar therapeutic potentials.
Working in a lab out of the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, doctoral candidate Zeus Tipado is studying the combination of the two. To do this, Tipado is fitting people with a brain scanner capable of reading perceptual changes during an immersive VR experience—all while they trip on DMT.
DMT is a potent psychoactive drug with a short duration of just 15 minutes. Like VR, high doses of the drug frequently take over the entire field of vision for participants, launching them into an unknown environment.
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Even with its rapid timeframe, DMT users experience an onslaught of thoughts, experiences, and emotions flowing like water from a firehose. Most have difficulty breaking down their experience into words and the memory dissipates rapidly.
However, when you see something—or even “visualize it” in your mind—your brain reacts to it in unique ways, depending on how it’s interpreting the stimuli. “If we could read all that data,” Tipado told The Daily Beast, “we could take it and perhaps replay that data so your friend can also experience the same sensory experience you had.”
Once we reliably understand what a person saw, it may become possible to code it into a video or VR experience, create new technology to duplicate the effect in others, or at least read the data to understand what someone else experienced.
Tipado and his team hope they can figure out how to “read” another person’s visual experience using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) scanner, DMT, and VR. In doing so, they may demystify the subjective experience of psychedelics and open the door for a more in-depth understanding of how they work—and how they might help us solve some of the most pernicious mental health issues out there like treatment-resistant depression and anxiety.
Set and Setting
The fNIRS scanner fits over the head like a swimming cap. That makes it less invasive than an MRI or EEG, while allowing for fuller movement. “It can only penetrate the top layer of the brain—the sensory area,” Tipado explained, but this may be enough to gain a rich understanding of what’s going on in the mind during the hallucinatory process.
“Imagine it like a screen in the theater,” he said. “We only see the final result of [activity within] the deep areas [of the brain].”
fNIRS detects whether or not blood cells contain oxygen—shifting between having oxygen and not is a major form of brain function. Tipado claims this phenomenon likely contributes to “almost all psychedelic experiences.” Using this data, he’s hoping to create a sort of neurological lexicon—an account of how the brain reacts—to make it possible to read the hallucinatory visuals of psychedelics.
A test subject wears the VR headset with the fNIRS scanner. fNIRS detects whether or not blood cells contain oxygen—shifting between having oxygen and not is a major form of brain function. Tipado claims this phenomenon likely contributes to “almost all psychedelic experiences.
Courtesy of Zeus TipadoPsychedelic proponents constantly repeat the mantra “set and setting” as a reminder of the most crucial components of a trip. These refer to your mindset entering the experience (set) and the environment surrounding you (setting). The latter often informs the former when we’re tripping and in our daily lives. For example, compare your mood in a dirty room on a cloudy day vs hiking on a beautiful afternoon.
Tipado says that VR provides for “enriched settings” that can create more enjoyable environments for more positive outcomes for those who are tripping. Studies have shown that the technology can have good outcomes even for sober patients. One of the biggest breakthrough experiments on VR immersed burn victims in a digital, snowy environment while they underwent painful medical procedures. The patients who wore VR during the surgery reported a significantly higher pain threshold than those without the intervention.
That experiment occurred in 2004, when VR technology still had rudimentary graphics. Today, headsets and displays have reached a level of realism that far surpasses that of its early predecessors. The brain can’t tell the difference either. It’s just along for the ride, taking it all in just like you.
In fact, a more recent study published in Oct. 2023 found similar results where the headsets relieved both pain and anxiety from patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, kidney diseases, and even dementia.
Zeus Tipado gets excited for another VR test. Tipado and his team hope they can figure out how to “read” another person’s visual experience using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) scanner, DMT, and VR.
Courtesy of Zeus TipadoSo VR can provide a reliably calming environment wherever you’re physically located and enrich the environment of your trip. The pursuit of more conducive settings has led psychonauts (hobbyists and researchers who take hallucinogens to explore their consciousness) everywhere from a dark, clean room to the Amazon rainforest.
For many, the benefits are nearly limitless: You could partake in a traditional ayahuasca ceremony without exploiting indigenous cultures/ecosystems, fly around the world twice without contributing to climate change, or simply float through space, untethered to our current reality.
“The brain does a poor job in discerning from what it’s seeing and what’s being hallucinated,” Tipado explained.
Whether you see an object in real life, on a screen, or in your imagination, it reads the same on fNIRS. Tipado’s research has already located the specific activity of four common visual phenomena associated with psychedelic use. Namely, he can read when a person starts to see a face form, the amount of color they see, the movement of objects, and where they see (or visualize) something in their field of vision.
Say you take a dose of DMT—the colors begin to shift, melt, and fall apart before moving rapidly around and past you. They move so fast, you feel you are “launching” into outer space and, when they get there, you meet one of the famed “DMT entities”—godlike beings that may or may not communicate with you.
Tipado could use the headset to note those colors, when and how they move around, the speed with which they are moving, and the moment the entity appears (along with where it is, how big it is, and if it’s moving). Later, this data could be used to interpret the experience for the patient or—in the future—be used to help them relive it.
Turn On, Log In, Trip Out
Like any scientific breakthrough, where we go with the information and advancements it may lead to is up to us. Down one path, we could neurologically understand the sensory phenomena of a psychedelic experience. Using this data, we may be able to program it into a VR program of its own, to “share” our trip with others—at least the visual elements of it.
If we could figure out how to add or remove oxygen safely from the blood (the factor fNIRS reads), we might replace the VR headset altogether. In this instance, we could “trick” the brain into believing it’s receiving visual stimuli that aren’t even there.
This goes beyond VR, effectively translating the exact perceptual experience of one person to another. Instead of watching what happened to someone else, it could essentially happen to you as well.
Zeus Tipado tests out a VR environment. Tipado says that VR provides for “enriched settings” that can create more enjoyable environments for more positive outcomes for those who are tripping.
Courtesy of Zeus TipadoMoreover, trained psychologists and analysts could work together to understand the experiences their patients have. For example, your mental health provider could point to a moment from your trip and invite you to unpack it from a sober mindset.
Integration—the concept of taking the lessons from your trip into your life and incorporating them—is a major component of how successful a psychedelic experience is. This could give an impartial third party access to every message you received or image you saw to drill down on each component.
Unfortunately, we’re still a long way from this reality—and psychedelics aren’t exempt from toxic influences. Psychedelics and VR both increase a person’s openness to change, whether that change is for better or worse.
Ego-dissolution (losing a sense of your self-identity, thoughts, and personality) is a common effect of large doses of psychedelics. While psychonauts often praise and seek this state, Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot pointed out that bad actors such as abusers and even cult leaders exploit this for their own gains in their 2021 study.
Another concern comes with the potential for “depersonalization” and “derealization”—or, losing touch with your personality and reality, respectively.
“When you take off your VR headset, you have a weird sensation…your ego has shifted—not dissolved, but transformed into a virtual object,” Tipado explained. You become an alternate version of yourself within VR (and on psychedelics), and returning to who you once were may become harder.
Think of it like getting off the treadmill and still feeling the sensation of walking. These moments where we lose touch with ourselves can feel destabilizing and chaotic.
Joseph Emerson, the pilot who recently attempted to crash an Alaskan Airlines flight, took mushrooms two full days before the incident. He told the New York Times that he believed he was in a dream (not reality) and needed to crash the plane to wake up. VR could bolster this destabilizing effect and create a wider distance between the user and the reality they hope to return to.
Still, the potential benefits of coupling VR with psychedelics are good enough reasons for folks like Tipado to continue researching. Not only can they be tremendously impactful in helping address incredibly difficult-to-treat mental health issues, but it could just simply give more people a deeper understanding of their own consciousness—allowing them to freely, and safely, hallucinate from the comfort of their headset.
