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Cyberdelics: Context engineering psychedelics for altered traits
Abstract
‘Cyberdelics’ and ‘Cyberdelic Psychotherapy’ have the potential to offer greater precision in modulating and entraining therapeutic psychedelic experiences. Both Psychedelics and Cyberdelics have the potential to immerse users in enriched sensory landscapes; both have been studied as mediums of transformative experience and both have been used as aids to help recovery from mental illness. Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) is a promising and unique therapeutic modality with a focus on disrupting entrenched ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving. Both Psychedelics and Cyberdelics do not guarantee positive change, they are experiential medicines and technologies that may provide a ‘window of plasticity’ that can be utilised within a therapeutic process, towards wellbeing and personal growth. To frame and catalyse both spheres, Context engineering (CE) involves the deliberate re-structuring of experience to enhance and expand perception and cognition. CE gives us new abilities and control over our senses providing us with a new type of self and societal exploration. CE considers the broad spectrum of what augmentation can do but also highlights the dangers of focusing solely on the medicine or the technology. Our hypothesis is that the use of context-engineered virtual and augmented environments can assist in stabilising the insights precipitated through the psychedelic-assisted therapy process. We propose a variety of game mechanics or mechanisms by which cyberdelics may help modulate or optimise psychedelic-assisted therapy, supported by context engineering, positive psychology, mindfulness, transformative experience design, and the gamification of wellbeing. If utilised wisely, cyberdelics may provide an enhanced learning environment for the development of set, setting and skills to support psychedelic-assisted therapy from preparation, acute-experience to integration.
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