Controlling Human Emotions With Immersive AIVR Experiences - With Dr. Srini Pillay

Speaker 2
For me, one of the most fascinating things about virtual reality is that you have a body that's sitting in a chair that's your actual body. And then you have the body that believes it's walking in the woods, for example. And the body that believes it's walking in the woods because of what your brain does to convince it that it is immersed in that. Can experience a calmness, this illusory body can experience a calmness that transfers to the actual body. I've been thinking about this so deeply that I actually call it body illusion medicine. I think it has the potential to become a whole new field where the illusory body that believes it is in the VR space actually transfers the therapeutic effect to the actual body. Now, there's two elements there. One is we know believing can actually, believing in something positive can actually increase dopamine and impact the reward circuitry and can actually increase opioids in the brain. I mean, this is from placebo studies. So for example, there was one study that looked at people with three tubes of cream and they were all neutral creams. But one was labeled lidocaine, one was labeled capsaicin and the third was labeled neutral. And lidocaine for pain relief when people took that, they said, wow, this feels really calming. And when they took the capsaicin, they were like, oh, this thing's a little. And when they took the neutral, they said nothing happened. And when you looked in their brains, what you saw was that when you expect something positive, the reward circuits light up. And when you expect something negative, the pain circuits light up. So what this tells us is that our expectation and belief can change what's going on in the brain. And so in VR, if you are immersed in a positive expectation, this expectation translates.

Speaker 1
Yeah. And this, I mean, the idea of relaxation, very, very interesting and important, I've said a hundred times, if I wasn't focused on AI, I would be focused on the placebo effect because it is the most magical and mysterious thing. For me, every headline in every newspaper every day should be about the literal magic conjured fourth by the placebo effect. And to your point, well, in VR, obviously there's a big impact here. I mean, I know there's labs working on putting people in a cold environment where they're playing some game in the snow while they're getting surgery on their third degree burns. And this is helping them decrease pain because they actually feel a little bit cold and they don't feel the heat or if they do feel the sensation, it actually feels like cold and not like heat simply because of the mind. So clearly to your point, immersion helps us get there.

Speaker 2
So I used to direct the outpatient anxiety disorder program at the Clayton Hospital. So I had some experience in how anxious states present. And right now, our diagnostic classification in psychiatry is not the best. So what we decided to do was to look at symptom clusters within the broad spectrum of anxiety that might actually be the main uncomfortable feeling that someone is feeling. So when you're anxious, you feel overwhelmed. So the first group of experiences would be experiences that decrease overwhelmed. When you're anxious, you also have biased attention to threat and you worry a lot. So distraction can actually help you feel less worried. When you're anxious, you also feel like you can't focus. And so improving focus can decrease your anxiety. When you're anxious, you also feel like your body is tense. So relaxing the body can decrease anxiety. When you're anxious, you also feel like you're stuck in a rut. So having an escape can decrease an anxiety. And when you're anxious, you have a sense of foreshortened future, which means you can't think too far into the future. And as a result, a sense of possibility can relieve that.

Speaker 2
So in terms of the big subject, which is the current goal standard for measurement in medicine is a double blind placebo control trial. And what this gives us is group data. It says if I give you a VR experience, it worked. It worked compared to a placebo and therefore it works in general. The problem with that is that a lot of people are not aware that in medicine there are numerous contradictions with even core ideas. And I'll give you two examples. If I said to you, what do you think about if you have blockage of your coronary arteries and you said, well, it looks like I need cardiac surgery, I need a bypass graft. Might that work? Well, studies have shown from 2004 onward that in many, many instances coronary artery bypass grafts are equal to placebo. Studies have also shown that if you look at lowering cholesterol levels, if you look at lowering LDL levels, in the American Journal of Cardiology and the British Medical Journal, so these are not peripheral journals, they have shown that in many instances in meta-analyses, you can increase the chances of stroke by lowering your cholesterol and you can increase the chances of death.

Speaker 2
Well, I do think it's going to require a very huge dataset to be able to make reliable predictions. And that's a big challenge in medicine because of the confidentiality issues, for example. It's very difficult for an entrepreneurial company, for example, to work with a hospital and then have access to all of that data for confidentiality reasons. So one big thing, which I think is going to relate to AI, is that we have to collect datasets that are large enough, but we may actually have to also create synthetic datasets using generative adversarial networks so that we can bolster those and then add to our predictive power. So I believe that measuring the more mainstream things like EEG or heart rate variability is going to be critical because we have to at least exclude those or include them in the final algorithm. But I also believe that there are other ways of measurement that are becoming intriguing to a lot of people. And I'll mention two of them. There's a theory that's called integrated information theory, which relates to the measurement of consciousness in any integrated system. And so there are physicists who are working on consciousness measurements that are not even necessarily in the brain, just aggregations of information. So this in medicine is outside of our bodies, is largely called the exposo. What we're realizing in medicine is that your well-being is very interactive with your environment. And the exposome are all the environmental factors that can change the way you're feeling. It could be as simple as a sunrise or a sunset. It could be climate. It could be oxygen. It could be color. It could be geometry. There are a lot of different factors. But if we can measure things like consciousness outside of the human body and then add that to the dataset, I think that takes us in a different field.

Speaker 2
I think that those areas of inquiry need to work alongside mainstream science so that they can be a continuous dialogue. I also believe only partly in linearity. I believe in linear thinking when we're communicating just because it's a decent thing to do with a lot of people around and they want to understand. But if you look at some of the most major discoveries, if you look at Einstein's theory of relativity, Einstein described it as a musical perception. He didn't just logically arrive at this. Something happened and there was an emergent thought. If you look at Carrie Banks-Miles, who discovered a way of making synthetic DNA, he was driving with his girlfriend from Berkeley to Mendocino, he was in a car, he had had some wine, he stopped, his lab mates hated it. He does not follow the scientific principles. He does not work at things from the fundamentals up. He suddenly got out of his car and started scribbling on a rock face and then rented a cabin and it occurred to him, wait a minute, this is how this occurs. I think we need to have the scientific method is a great framework upon which we can explore. But our methods of exploration need to be more varied. I think they need to be collaborative. I think we need to think way across fields. Right now I'm working with an NFT artist, Christa Kim, who's on, I noticed and I was like, wait a minute, this is changing something in my consciousness. I want to try to understand what she's up to.

Speaker 1
I think if left on my own, I think I'm often going to be thinking about, okay, what are the sensors to put on, et cetera? But I would concur with you completely that there is so much we don't understand and you're making a pretty strong argument here that the components of a rich personalized experience from the vantage point of inside of a human skull, which a whole universe shoots out of every skull, right? I mean, a whole universe shoots out that it's richer than slapping something on my index finger that's going to show my heart rate and little proxies like that. And so I think that's a really interesting point that we're probably not going to hear too many other times in the series, but one that I think warrants being brought up. So I like that a lot. I'm going to talk on the geometry thing for two seconds before we get into the future and talk about ideas about the future. But I want to touch on this. A lot of the time when people imagine what would be a great virtual experience. I actually think people are embarrassingly unimaginative because they are only imagining like, what was it, John Locke or something? You know, if all you know is the concept of gold and the concept of a duck, all you can imagine is a golden duck. I think that when people imagine VR, oh, would be so cool. I would do click and it's going to be things they would do in the real world. But like you said, in VR, you can float through nature. In VR, you can float through nature and all the leaves are like rainbow colors. In VR, you can float through nature, everything's rainbow colors and you're not floating through air. You're floating through like pudding. Like, there's no there's no limitations here. And I think that there are inherent brain circuits where that you and I will respond to. If we go walk in the woods, there's some circuit there and that circuits probably been there since Rodentia, by the way, probably been around since since we had a posted stamp layer of cortex so that some of those those circuits are pretty well baked in there. But there's all kinds of other things that might light us up that don't have some natural corollary as some real world corollary. They're entirely new.

Speaker 1
But there's all kinds of other things that might light us up that don't have some natural corollary as some real world corollary. They're entirely new. What might relax me might actually not the best relaxation might not be look like a waterfall with butterflies. It might look like insane things I've never thought of. You're now talking about geometry. It sounds like this ties to this idea, this idea of triangles that are rotating or circles. There's something harmonizing about it. It's not natural, but somehow it affects us. What are your thoughts about VR experiences that achieve these states that we want? Excitement, possibility, relaxation, lack of anxiety, whatever, being something we've never imagined before?

Speaker 2
Yeah, I feel very strongly about this for a lot of reasons. There's a scientific article entitled A Virtual Reality for Nonordinary Consciousness. And what it points at is that apart from calming you down or making you excited, you can have transcendent states. And these transcendent states we know from everyday life. It doesn't only come from obvious experiences, sorry, inistic art, for example. You see a man with apples in his eyes and it's like, wow, let me feel like something. What's that? If you don't know apples here, there are eyes. But somehow having apples in your eyes, it's evocative in a certain way.

Speaker 2
I mean, that means a huge promise about what the reality offers. And I think another aspect that we talked about was the look learning from the therapeutic effects of psychedelics and understanding that there is data to show that psychedelics can decrease inflammation. They can change brain states and they can reorganize the self. But we have 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion circuits. The self that's showing up today is not the only self that you could have. You could rearrange self circuitry. And so the question would be, can we use generative art to rearrange self circuitry and calibrate so that those controllers and say, actually, here's where I want to stop. This is the self that I want to be. And the idea that we could have multiple selves in one

Speaker 2
And then I also think it's important for optimizing, you know, early on you talked about how right now people are optimizing for theories, right? So people are able to match experiences to you so that you'll keep coming back.

Speaker 3
Engagement, yeah, that's the business model. Yeah.

Speaker 2
I think what we need to do with healthcare is add to that engagement for, is add to that AI for outcome because not everything that engages you is necessarily good.

Speaker 3
Oh, yeah, totally different. They're different, yeah.

Speaker 2
I would agree. We can put our literature that's emerging, that's looking at one minute TikTok video, showing the negative effects and attention even though people love watching them, and they have a tolerance for that.

Speaker 2
Yeah, I think we need to be aware of whatever this need for slavery consciousness is, where you go to a machine and you ask and you get exactly what you want. You get what you want, when you want, no matter what. And so, that's great from a machine. But if that becomes your mental training, and then you look at people in your life and you don't get what you want, you're gonna be enraged. You're gonna say, 10 minutes, my food's gonna come in 10 minutes. I want it now.

Speaker 1
Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 2
There's a way it's getting used to getting everything now. So, I think being aware of that is what we, no, I believe being reasonable about any of this is the direction we need to go in. But another point that I mentioned is that if AI does not have emotion, and it's debatable whether AI is sentient, then we're gonna be developing a relationship with something that is not gonna be activating the mirror neurons. So, we get less activation, and then the question becomes, will that make us more autistic? And is autism adaptive for the future human?