Mastering crises: how meditation and virtual reality help us to be more mindful

Marc Wittmann sits in his office and chats about his research. It is a very ordinary office, as you would imagine a university professor would have. A blackboard in the background contains notes from discussions, there are lots of bookshelves and even more paper. Every now and then, Wittmann takes a sip of tea and then carries on talking. Wittmann talks enthusiastically about experiments with psychedelic drugs carried out by his Swiss colleagues, his experiments with isolation tanks and research into manipulating the perception of time in virtual reality. And all of a sudden, the sixties come back to life.

At the time, psychologist Timothy Leary preached the use of LSD and other psychoactive drugs on the campus of Harvard University. He was then sentenced to ten years in prison for marijuana possession, escaped with the help of the militant Weathermen and finally went into exile. Or John C. Lilly: a psychologist and neurobiologist who was firmly convinced that we could communicate with dolphins. The isolation tank, in which you float in body-warm, highly saturated salt water while being visually and acoustically isolated from the world, was originally Lilly's invention. However, he liked to combine the sessions in the ‘flotation tank’ with doses of LSD - which ultimately caused him to drift into ever more distant spheres: towards the end of his life, Lilly was convinced that the fate of the universe was controlled by highly developed extraterrestrial entities.

However, unlike the gurus of the hippie movement, Wittmann is not interested in self-awareness, subculture and fun. It is about science, medicine and finding new ways to treat patients with psychiatric disorders, depression and schizophrenia. However, the potential of this research goes far beyond medical applications. After all, the ‘altered states of consciousness’ that Wittmann and others are now researching change, at best, the perception of one's own self. And in the words of philosopher and consciousness researcher Thomas Metzinger, this could give rise to a new ‘culture of consciousness’ - the title of his latest book. A culture that deals with the inner life of the mind on a rational and scientific basis. A culture that enables us, in times of global crises, ‘neither to lose our own sanity nor our own dignity’.

Fascinating clues to states of consciousness

At the centre of such a ‘culture of consciousness’ are theories and research findings that establish a connection between the perception of time, space, reality and the self. These theories are still incomplete. They describe the phenomena qualitatively and at different levels of abstraction. But they are already providing fascinating clues as to how states of consciousness can be specifically altered for our benefit. Science is thus in the process of opening up an area that for centuries was reserved for religion, philosophy and mysticism.

Can we use scientific methods to approach what has been considered unscientific for centuries? Can experiences such as flow or states of consciousness that arise during meditation be fathomed rationally? And can we utilise them, especially in times of global crises, to treat ourselves and our environment more mindfully?

A question of time

The loss of a sense of time, a dissolution of the boundaries of the self, a kind of cosmic connection with the world is repeatedly described by experienced meditators from a wide range of cultures and regions - as well as by users of psychedelic drugs. However, the practice of such states of consciousness cannot be reproduced. The practical techniques of immersion, which are supposed to lead to the longed-for enlightenment, are often linked to mystical and esoteric explanations about the origin and meaning of this world. This is not for rational minds. And taking psychoactive substances is not only dangerous, it is also forbidden.

Wittmann recommended a special form of bathing instead. The floating tank is something like ‘instant meditation’, he enthuses. ‘I'm not much of a meditator myself, but in the floating tank, even I get into deep, meditation-like states relatively quickly.’ In this tank, you float on body-warm, highly saturated salt water - just like in the Dead Sea. ‘The outer boundary to your surroundings disappears and you become one with your environment,’ he says, ’and then you lose track of time.’

However, meditation, mindfulness and the perception of time are closely linked. Wittmann's colleagues, led by Cologne psychiatrist Kai Vogeley, have tested how the perception of time can be manipulated in VR environments as part of the Virtual Times project. One scene they designed: users sit on the bridge of a spaceship while a field of stars moves before their eyes. If the users are stressed, the movement of the star field is accelerated; if they relax, the stars move more slowly. Through this manipulation, the researchers were able to achieve that time passed subjectively faster for the test subjects.

Key to changing self-perception

Another experiment was designed to put the test subjects into a state of flow: ‘Thumper is a game in VR in which they appear to be travelling on a rollercoaster,’ says Wittmann. On this ride, objects come towards you and you have to push them aside in time so that they don't hinder your journey. ‘You ride this rollercoaster and have to concentrate really hard - so much so that you lose time and yourself.’ According to Wittmann, the better the test subjects were at the game, the stronger their sense of flow and the faster time passed for them.

Figure 1: The VR game Thumper is designed to put users in a state of flow in which they forget time and themselves in order to reduce stress and anxiety. (Image: Screenshot: VirtualTimes / Thumper, © Drool LLC 2013-2019)

For Wittmann and his colleagues, it is precisely this ‘loss of time and self’ that is the key to changing self-perception. They were able to prove that it is part of mindfulness-based stress reduction and are convinced that it can have a similarly favourable effect on patients with anxiety disorders, depression or schizophrenia - comparable to the effect of antidepressants.

The reason: "Normally, we are constantly thinking about the past and the future," says Wittmann. "You are already thinking about the next question that you will have, or maybe you are still thinking about an old question." This "expansion of presence time" is closely linked to the "narrative self," he explains, "our own story about who we are and how we appear in the world." In patients with depression or anxiety disorders, however, it is precisely this "narrative self that is very much ramped up," and "negative thought loops, ruminations" arise. "If I am now focused on this moment of presence - the here and now - then I lose this expansion of the time zone to the past and the future," says Witmann. The sense of time therefore serves as a lever to arrive in the here and now and not to burden oneself with fears, anxieties or missed opportunities. It is precisely this arrival in the here and now that is the goal of mindfulness exercises, which are intended to help not only sick but also healthy people to better deal with stress and stressful situations.

The fact that this state can be brought about by manipulating the perception of time is "an interesting idea," says British consciousness researcher Anil Seth. "But I don't think there is any evidence for it. I don't think the perception of time is a lever. I think it's more of a side effect." But one that, in his opinion, can reveal a lot about the structure of consciousness.

The Mystery of Time

How living things perceive the passage of time is still not understood by science. However, the timer-accumulator model is used by many researchers as a "rough heuristic" to describe how time perception works, says Marc Wittmann. In other words: The model roughly describes the functions, but is most likely too simplified.According to this, there are timers in living things that send out impulses at regular intervals, which are collected by a second system called an accumulator. The more pulses the accumulator has collected, the longer the time that has passed is perceived. However, the timer and the accumulator are influenced by two factors: if the physical level of arousal increases, the timer fires faster; if it decreases, it fires slower. The accumulator, on the other hand, only collects impulses when attention is focused on the perception of time. If you do not pay attention to time, if you are distracted, it flies by.The theory is controversial, however. To test it, neurobiologist David Eagleman designed a spectacular experiment in 2007: Together with his team, he designed a special digital clock whose display flickered so quickly that it was impossible to read under normal conditions. He then persuaded volunteers to jump into a net from a height of 30 meters while staring at their flickering clocks. If the internal clock really accelerates, then - he reasoned - the volunteers should see how the blur dissolves into readable numbers in free fall. They were unable to do this - but this does not definitively disprove the timekeeper theory.

Controlled Hallucination

For Seth - and with him a growing number of researchers - the key to understanding consciousness lies in perception: According to him, perception is not a passive process in which information from the sensory organs is sent from the outside to the brain and processed and interpreted there. Rather, the process runs in both directions: the brain produces hypotheses about patterns in the sensory data. It constantly compares these with the perceptions of the sensory organs and adapts its hypotheses. In doing so, the difference between the model that the brain develops and the sensory data is made as small as possible.

The model has similarities to autoencoders. These are artificial neural networks that learn independently to recognize essential properties of their training data and store them in a compact, abstracted form. Before turning to consciousness research, Seth studied natural sciences and computer science - so the parallels are certainly no coincidence.

This model of subjective perception is not only easy to model on the computer, but can also explain an astonishing range of phenomena. Optical illusions, for example, such as the case of the famous "dress": a wedding dress, the photo of which went viral on social media in 2015, appears black and blue to some viewers, white and gold to others. The effect can be explained by what is known as "color constancy": a kind of automatic white balance of the human eye that allows us to see colors as we are used to even under changing lighting conditions. Strawberries, for example, always appear red to us, even if they actually look completely different in violet light. But how does this ability work? In the eye, three different types of photoreceptor cells are stimulated to varying degrees by light of different wavelengths.

Expectation of how the world is

However, this physiological mechanism alone would cause colored objects to always look different under different lighting conditions. The brain then produces an expectation of what the world is like based on previous experiences. It places this idea over the sensory data in order to weight and interpret it. This then results in an almost constant color sensation even under changing lighting conditions.

However, this internal color correction does not work the same for everyone. Since the lighting of the dress in the picture is not clearly interpretable, it apparently leads to completely different results in perception. Seth calls this a "controlled hallucination". What we subjectively perceive is a mixture of the information from our senses and our idea of ​​the world. "Of course, this idea is relatively close to the real world and strongly influenced by it," says Seth.

But it is not identical: "If you and I are walking together in Brighton today and we see that the sky is blue today, we may use the same word to describe that sky," says Seth. "But you certainly have a different perception of color than I do."

Everything is perception

The world that we subjectively perceive always contains something of the model that we create of it. That is why we sometimes see faces or fantastic creatures in clouds - or monsters in the shadows. And the more the brain's predictive models gain the upper hand - in the case of mental disorders or under the influence of psychedelic drugs, for example - the more they distort and bend our perceptions.

To illustrate this effect, Keizo Suzuki and Seth designed a computer simulation: the Hallucination Machine. The system outputs a video of a walk on campus on a VR headset. However, every single video frame runs through a modified Deep Dream algorithm. This is a special neural network developed in 2015 that changes the input image until it matches the activation patterns of the artificial neurons - roughly speaking, this amplifies and visualizes the effect we experience when we see faces in shadows or clouds. The result is trippy: human heads become colorful dog heads, flowers sprout from limbs, and colored edges appear. It is actually a simulation "of a hallucinogenic experience in a biologically plausible way" - and "without changing the underlying neurophysiology," the authors emphasize. A trip without drugs.

Theories of consciousness

The question of whether the mystery of consciousness can be solved at all is controversial. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote that we would probably never be able to understand how other living beings experience the world, or, in his words, "what it is like to be a bat." In 1995, the philosopher David Chalmers was only slightly more optimistic when he described the search for a scientific explanation for subjective experience as a "hard problem." Regardless, several theories have emerged over the past 30 years that attempt to explain what consciousness is at various levels of abstraction.

GLOBAL WORKSPACE

The global workspace theory was first developed by the psychologist Bernard Baars in 1988, and the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene expanded on it. According to this theory, mental content such as perceptions, thoughts and emotions are processed autonomously in different regions of the brain. They enter consciousness when several different regions of the brain access this content in a synchronized manner, which is then available in a "global workspace." The conscious perception of an object, for example, allows actions to be planned with this perceived object. The theory is therefore one of the functional explanations according to which consciousness must be explained primarily in terms of its use.

INTEGRATED INFORMATION

The Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which was proposed in 2004 by the Italian brain researcher Giulio Tononi, approaches the problem on a much more abstract level. According to this theory, every physical system can be assigned a consciousness measure. This number Φ (the Greek letter Phi) lies between 0 and 1 and, very simply, describes the amount of information that a system generates as a whole and that goes beyond the amount of information generated by its individual parts. Although it is very abstract and partly counterintuitive, the IIT gave rise to a test procedure that can be used to measure whether coma patients are conscious.

PROGNOSIS MACHINE

The third major block describes the brain in various variations as an independently learning prediction machine. According to this theory, it constantly forms hypotheses about the causes and further course of the incoming sensory data and compares them with each other. According to Anil Seth, consciousness is the result of this comparison, a "controlled hallucination", an idea of ​​how the world is based on the signals from the senses. (Anil Seth: Being You, A New Science of Consciousness). Mathematically, this can be described, for example, by the Free Energy Principle of the British brain researcher Karl Friston.

The model of the brain is “transparent”

However, the idea that perception is not a one-way street goes far beyond the explanation of optical illusions or the simulation of drug experiences. The concept also applies to other forms of perception: the perception of space, of one's own body, the perception of reality. Everything is based on our brain's ideas about how the world is, says Anil Seth. The perception of oneself in the first person, the idea of ​​being an unchanging personality, is also based on this mechanism. It bundles these perceptions in a "self-model". But we are usually not aware of this - the model of the brain is "transparent", as the philosophers say.

This could explain why self-perception changes when researchers play with their subjects' sense of time in VR environments and why it relieves fears and alleviates delusions. It could explain why the isolation tank, which seems to dissolve the outer boundary of the body and reduces the person completely to their inner perception, leads to meditation-like states. Or why an “out-of-body experience” in VR, the feeling of no longer being in one’s own body, alleviates the fear of one’s own mortality, as Pierre Bourdin and colleagues from the University of Barcelona discovered in 2017 – albeit only with a very small group of people.

What interests Seth is a realization that is also described after extensive meditation practice: that the self is impermanent. "It is constantly changing. It is not a thing, it is also a form of perception, a kind of construction of the brain to organize its behavior in the world." Buddhist texts have been writing about this "for thousands of years," says Seth. "But it is also something that modern neuroscience has discovered."

A New Culture of Consciousness

"That's right," says philosopher and consciousness researcher Thomas Metzinger. "Meditation has proven positive effects." Thanks to the results of consciousness research, we now have a better understanding of possible "contraindications," i.e. circumstances in which meditation does more harm than good. To put it a little exaggeratedly, the idea that meditation and mindfulness are in themselves an answer to the planetary crises could also be seen as such a contraindication. It cannot be the right reaction to "just put a kind of mental pacifier in your mouth to feel good" as part of capitalist self-optimization.

Like Anil Seth, Metzinger is convinced that our ego is an illusion, a "self-model of the brain" that has enabled us humans to be extremely successful in evolutionary terms. "But evolution has never been about us being happy," says Metzinger, "only about us being able to pass on our genes as well as possible." The result: "Greed, envy and the desire for dominance are implanted in us by evolution." We can break free from these behaviors, which are diametrically opposed to mindfulness and resilience, when we become aware of them. "Not on a theoretical level, but directly, immediately, without thoughts and words," says Metzinger. Because the shift in attention weakens the weighting of the self-model in perception - we see the world differently in the truest sense of the word. "This allows us to recognize our perception, our conscious model of reality, as a construction, a kind of virtual reality," says Metzinger. By "recognizing the inner, unconscious driving forces," we have a chance to decide whether we really want to act the way we usually do. And possibly develop a lifestyle that is not based on ever-increasing growth.

The "Dreamachine" project

Anil Seth takes a more pragmatic approach to the question of self-modulation. Together with researchers and artists, he has set up the "Dreamachine" project: a kind of interactive art exhibition, half happening, half scientific experiment. The visitors rest in groups of 20 to 30 people on comfortable loungers while they embark on an inner journey with their eyes closed, driven by music and intense strobe lights at different frequencies.

"We ask people afterwards what they saw," says Seth. "And there's a lot going on. They see colors and shapes and geometries. It's like a very intense, focused meditation phase." This intense experience of a rich, complex inner world, says Seth, can change people - tear them out of the same old loops in which they are always just looking for confirmation of what they already believe to be right. Recognizing "inner diversity" "can be just as transformative for society as recognizing external diversity has been."

Figure 2: Participants in the Dreamachine experiment later drew what they had seen in their mind's eye during the performance: usually abstract, colorful, geometric patterns reminiscent of LSD trips. (Image: Dreamachine)

While the war in Ukraine continues to escalate, the next war is looming in the South Pacific, social divisions continue to grow, and we are simultaneously racing full speed toward irreversible global warming, this hope seems naive. However, the results of consciousness research actually show ways and techniques to break free from destructive endless loops. And all this without following gurus, deities or profiteers and without giving up the rational, critical mind. The experiments and technologies are still in their early stages, but they show fascinating potential. However, thousands of years of human history have also shown that dealing with one's own inner world alone will not be enough.