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Abstract

      Perhaps more than any other experience, death has a fundamental significance owing to its inevitability. So-called ‘terror management theory’ (TMT) proposes that human death anxiety results from the conflict between our evolutionary self-preservation instinct and our awareness of our inevitable mortality. TMT sees human behavior as a way of managing this fundamental anxiety – e.g., we construct cultural beliefs, systems, and communities that counter biological mortality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value. Broadly speaking, trauma tends to amplify fear. Seen through the lens of TMT, ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs) should therefore amplify death anxiety. NDEs however, offer a fascinating exception to TMT: they appear to quickly and dramatically diminish the anxiety associated with death. The dramatic benefits associated with NDEs in transforming attitudes toward death have inspired researchers to explore other types of experiences that mimic NDEs. For example, several researchers have proposed that psychedelic drug experiences closely model NDEs. In recent work, we showed that the so-called ‘numadelic’ aesthetic implemented within VR could be used to design experiences which elicit psychometric scores comparable to moderate doses of psychedelics. Like psychedelics, numadelic VR can help dissolve conventional spatio-temporal conceptual distinctions and foster a corresponding sense of connectedness and unity. Given the ability of numadelic VR to model these aspects of psychedelics, we recently set out to address the following question: Can numadelic VR achieve comparable results as psychedelics in helping to reduce fear, depression, anxiety, and loneliness often experienced by those facing life-threatening illnesses (LTI).

      In this presentation, David Glowacki will discuss efforts to design a numadelic VR program called ‘Clear Light’ which enables those facing LTIs to come together in VR and contemplate the possibility that awareness extends beyond the physical body. He will present initial results which suggest that numadelic VR may have an efficacy comparable to psychedelics, and outline future research plans involving collaboration with networks of palliative care specialists and death doulas.

Biography

David Glowacki, PhD, MA (www.glow-wacky.com) is a cross-disciplinary researcher, artist, and author who has published across domains spanning computer science, nanoscience, aesthetics, cultural theory, and neuroscience.

He is the founder of the ‘Intangible Realities Laboratory’ (www.theirl.org), a research group at the CiTIUS research institute in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) who work at the immersive frontiers of scientific, aesthetic, computational, and technological practice.

He is a co-founder of ‘aNUma’, a company which has developed technology to support immersive “numadelic” experiences, in which our conventional material bodies are transformed into light. His immersive digital artworks have been experienced by more than 200,000 people on three continents. They are designed to dissolve our sense of separated individual identity by re-imagining our interconnectedness to the broader energetic matrix in which we are embedded.

He is the recipient of many prestigious scientific research awards, including a Royal Society research fellowship, ERC consolidator grant, Philip Leverhulme Award, and Oportunius fellowship. His recent scientific papers showing that numadelic VR experiences give psychometric scores comparable to moderate doses of psychedelics have attracted significant attention. With recent support from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, he is currently developing VR models of his 2006 near-death experiences, offering people the opportunity to contemplate that awareness may persist beyond the end of the physical body.

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