Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 7, 2023
Giulia Magni, Cosimo Tuena, Giuseppe Riva
9 citations
Psychedelic substances may enhance creativity by inducing cognitive flexibility, allowing a wider range of associations and possibilities to be explored. Virtual Reality can simulate psychedelic perceptual and cognitive effects without associated risks. The Bayesian brain approach, rooted in predictive coding, offers a framework for understanding how psychedelic hallucinations affect cognition. Cognitive flexibility is linked to creative thinking and depends on prefrontal cortex and networks supporting executive functions, memory, attention, and spontaneous thought. Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment involve declines in creative processing and divergent thinking. The paper suggests that VR-induced psychedelic hallucinations may help optimize the balance between top-down expectations and bottom-up sensory information, potentially maintaining cognitive functions and preventing pathological conditions in aging.
Nature Mental Health
February 1, 2026
Giuseppe Riva, Giulia Brizzi, Clara Rastelli et al.
1 citation
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.
Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking
January 1, 2026
Giuseppe Riva, Brenda K Wiederhold, Fabrizia Mantovani
Hypnotized minds and large language models (LLMs) both produce sophisticated, context-appropriate behavior through automatic pattern-completion with limited executive oversight. This review identifies three shared principles: automaticity (responses arise from associative rather than deliberative processes), suppressed monitoring (leading to confabulation in hypnosis and hallucination in LLMs), and heightened contextual dependency (immediate cues override stable knowledge). Both systems produce coherent but ungrounded outputs requiring an external interpreter to supply meaning. They also exhibit functional agency—complex, goal-directed behavior—without subjective agency or conscious awareness. The review argues that hypnosis offers an experimental model for understanding how intention can dissociate from conscious deliberation, and suggests that reliable artificial intelligence may require hybrid architectures integrating generative fluency with executive monitoring.
Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience
December 1, 2025
Giulia Brizzi, Chiara Pupillo, Clara Rastelli et al.
A virtual reality simulation of a psychedelic experience, created by applying the Google DeepDream algorithm to a calming garden scene, enhanced cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control in healthy adults. Participants watched two 10-minute immersive VR videos: a standard garden and its hallucinated counterpart. After the hallucinatory video, they showed improved cognitive flexibility and reported greater absorption in the experience, though they found it less fluent. Both VR experiences reduced positive emotions, anxiety, heart rate, and sympathetic nervous system activity compared to before the videos. The combination of cognitive enhancement with a relaxed, awakened physiological state suggests such simulations might offer therapeutic benefits of psychedelics without their risks.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2025
Antonino Greco, Clara Rastelli, Andrea Ubaldi et al.
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.