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.
Exposure to simulated psychedelic hallucinations in virtual reality increased cognitive flexibility, as shown by reduced task-switching costs, compared to naturalistic VR exposure. No significant differences were found in linguistic automatic association tasks at word or sentence levels. Visually grounded high-level cognitive processes were modulated by the simulated hallucinations. The findings offer insights into bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes in altered states of consciousness without drugs, potentially informing neuroscience and clinical applications.