Dissolving yourself in connection to others: shared experiences of ego attenuation and connectedness during group VR experiences can be comparable to psychedelics

A distributed virtual reality framework called Isness-D, in which groups of people co-inhabit a shared space as luminous, diffuse bodies, can produce self-transcendent experiences statistically indistinguishable from those induced by psychedelic drugs. In a citizen-science experiment with 58 participants across an international network, scores on four standard scales—ego-dissolution, inclusion of community in self, communitas, and mystical experience—were comparable to published psychedelic studies. The findings demonstrate that distributed multi-person VR can reliably blur self-other boundaries and create intersubjective experiences of merging with others.

Study at a glance

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 phenomenological intersubjective experience where bodies can fluidly merge, enabling participants to have an experience of including 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.