No need for 'magic' mushrooms. 'Hallucination machine' takes you on a drug-free trip

Researchers in the U.K. are using virtual reality to create a machine capable of generating drug-free hallucinations.

In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at the Sackler Center for Consciousness Science at England's University of Sussex combined a virtual reality platform with Google computer program DeepDream to build a "hallucination machine."

In the study, users viewed a series of panoramic videos featuring natural scenes through a virtual reality headset. Researchers then used a visualization algorithm called DeepDream to produce "biologically realistic visual hallucinations."

After viewing the scenes, participants filled out questionnaires to describe their experiences. Researchers found the hallucinations from the machine were similar to hallucinations induced by psilocybin, a psychedelic drug and the active ingredient in "magic" mushrooms.

Anil Seth, one of the lead researchers on the study, said the machine can offer an understanding of how the brain works when experiencing hallucinations caused by either drugs or psychiatric conditions.

"Unravelling the brain basis of unusual perceptual experiences, like hallucinations, is important both for understanding how normal everyday conscious perception works, and it also sheds new light onto how changes in visual processing in the brain lead to specific kinds of hallucinatory experience," said Seth.

Seth said he wants to tweak the machine for future research to simulate different hallucinatory experiences and combine them with brain imaging. "This will bring us a step closer to understanding how our brain generates visual experience, both in normal everyday life and in hallucinatory episodes."

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