Nature Mental Health
February 1, 2026
Giuseppe Riva, Giulia Brizzi, Clara Rastelli et al.
1 citation
Psychedelic-assisted therapy shows promise for mental health treatment but faces regulatory, methodological and safety challenges. In this Comment, we propose using artificial intelligence and virtual reality to simulate similar experiences to those produced by traditional psychedelic compounds for use in psychedelic-assisted therapy modalities.
Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience
December 1, 2025
Giulia Brizzi, Chiara Pupillo, Clara Rastelli et al.
Psychedelics were explored for their potential in the mental health field. However, research was delayed by concerns over short-term side effects and long-term consequences of substance use. Technological advances enabled the development of Hallucinatory Visual Virtual Experiences (HVVEs), namely psychedelic experiences simulations in immersive virtual reality. This study investigated HVVEs'...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2025
Antonino Greco, Clara Rastelli, Andrea Ubaldi et al.
Psychedelic drugs offer valuable insights into consciousness, but disentangling their causal effects on perceptual and high-level cognition is nontrivial. Technological advances in virtual reality (VR) and machine learning have enabled the immersive simulation of visual hallucinations. However, comprehensive experimental data on how these simulated hallucinations affects high-level human...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2025
Scott Matthews, Antonino Greco, Clara Rastelli et al.
1 citation
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is a remarkably promising treatment for substance use disorders and for alcohol use disorder (AUD) in particular. Research supporting psychedelics as a safe and effective pharmacotherapy for AUD and its comorbid psychiatric conditions dates from the late1940s and includes over 2,000 published studies. There are, however, challenges to the clinical implementation of...
Applied Sciences
December 19, 2024
Nicola De Pisapia, Gabriele Penazzi, Ignacio Ibarra et al.
2 citations
This study explores the use of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) cave environments to investigate hypotheses concerning altered states of consciousness, creativity, and flexible thinking in archaeological contexts. Building on the premise that ancient humans used caves as sites for rituals involving altered consciousness, we recreated a virtual cave environment to simulate these experiences and...