Immersive virtual reality cave environments can induce higher emotional arousal, spiritual engagement, and improvements in creativity and flexible thinking compared to virtual open spaces. Participants performed pareidolic tasks in both settings, and the cave setting led to changes in semantic network organization and subjective experience. These findings support the hypothesis that ancient humans used caves for rituals involving altered consciousness, and demonstrate that VR can reconstruct early human experiences to investigate psychological and cognitive states. The work bridges cognitive archaeology and immersive VR technologies.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy holds potential for treating mental health conditions but is hindered by regulatory, methodological, and safety issues. The authors propose using artificial intelligence and virtual reality to simulate experiences akin to those from traditional psychedelic compounds, offering a novel approach to psychedelic-assisted therapy that could bypass some of these challenges.
Virtual reality simulations of psychedelic phenomenology can replicate neurophysiological and behavioral markers of classic serotonergic psychedelics in healthy subjects, suggesting they may serve as an adjunct or replacement for aspects of psychedelic-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder. The authors propose four clinical applications: preparing patients for psychedelics, extending their efficacy, facilitating integration after dosing, and standardizing the therapeutic set and setting. Virtual reality may also function as a placebo in clinical research and as a tool to study subjective psychedelic experiences. Integrating virtual reality into psychedelic therapy and research could enable new treatment possibilities and implementation pathways.