From virtual addiction to therapy! This sounds a bit nebulous to me!
Can virtual reality compete with or even supersede psychedelics like LSD or Psilocybin? Just the thought of it could make one hallucinate (just kidding).
Is this more like quackery or is there something about it? Could it mean that indeed human consciousness extends beyond one's physical body or that we can have out of body experiences?
By distributed, they mean that the participants in a VR session are geographically separated.
"How it works: Isness-D is designed for groups of four to five people, with each participant represented as a diffuse cloud of smoke with a ball of light right about where a person’s heart would be. The experience involves participants gathering in the same spot in the virtual space to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego reduction mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience.
Why it matters: Given that Isness-D elicited responses indistinguishable from those associated with medium doses of psychedelics, it could help to alleviate the symptoms of mental health conditions obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, all of which psychedelic-assisted therapy has been remarkably good at easing."
From the abstract:
"With a growing body of research highlighting the therapeutic potential of experiential phenomenology which diminishes egoic identity and increases one’s sense of connectedness, there is significant interest in how to elicit such ‘self-transcendent experiences’ (STEs) in laboratory contexts. Psychedelic drugs (YDs) have proven particularly effective in this respect, producing subjective phenomenology which reliably elicits intense STEs. With virtual reality (VR) emerging as a powerful tool for constructing new perceptual environments, we describe a VR framework called ‘Isness-distributed’ (Isness-D) which harnesses the unique affordances of distributed multi-person VR to blur conventional self-other boundaries. Within Isness-D, groups of participants co-habit a shared virtual space, collectively experiencing their bodies as luminous energetic essences with diffuse spatial boundaries. It enables moments of ‘energetic coalescence’, a new class of embodied intersubjective experience where bodies can fluidly merge, enabling participants to include multiple others within their self-representation. To evaluate Isness-D, we adopted a citizen science approach, coordinating an international network of Isness-D 'nodes'. We analyzed the results (N = 58) using 4 different self-report scales previously applied to analyze subjective YD phenomenology (the inclusion of community in self scale, ego-dissolution inventory, communitas scale, and the MEQ30 mystical experience questionnaire). Despite the complexities associated with a distributed experiment like this, the Isness-D scores on all 4 scales were statistically indistinguishable from recently published YD studies, demonstrating that distributed VR can be used to design intersubjective STEs where people dissolve their sense of self in the connection to others."
Figure 4
From: Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics
No comments:
Post a Comment