A New Era of Experiential Medicine - From Video Games to Psychedelics

For thousands of years, we humans have been creating and ritualizing experiences to enrich our lives: music, dance, art, sports, story and games. We've also intentionally designed experiences to support our mental health, such as meditation and mindfulness practice. And yet despite this rich history, most people don’t think about experience as medicine, certainly not in the same way that they think about pills. I will share my 20 year journey to develop and validate experiences as medicine by integrating neuroscience-guided design, invention and experimentation. I will discuss my inventions of closed-loop video games, which has now become the first FDA-cleared video game, and the first digital treatment for ADHD.  We will then look towards the next generation of experiential medicine that will incorporate advances in artificial intelligence, sensory immersion, virtual reality, multimodal physiological recordings and non-invasive brain stimulation. I will conclude with a discussion of the potential of one of the oldest experiential medicines -- psychedelics.

A New Era of Experiential Medicine: Cognitive Enhancement Technologies

A fundamental challenge of our global healthcare system is the development and distribution of effective treatments to enhance cognition in those suffering from diverse psychiatric and neurological conditions. Dr. Gazzaley will describe the use of custom-designed, closed-loop video games to achieve cognitive benefits in both healthy individuals (Nature 2013; Nature Aging 2022) and patients (Lancet 2020).This approach has now yielded the first FDA-approved video game for any clinical condition. He will share with you the next stage of his research program, which integrates digitally-delivered experiences, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, multimodal physiological recordings, non-invasive electrical brain stimulation and psychedelics to enhance cognition.

The Distracted Mind: Improve Student Attention Through Technology

We are living in extraordinary times. Rapid advances in information technology have transformed our lives in countless ways. But we are now aware that our information-saturated world, coupled with growing expectations of immediate responsiveness, place excessive demands on our brains. This is especially true for our children. Dr.  Gazzaley will share an overview of his efforts to create and validate custom-designed technologies, presented in the form of video games, as effective tools to improve attention in children and adolescents, including those with learning differences and ADHD.

The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

We are living in extraordinary times. Rapid advances in information technology continuously transform our lives in countless ways. But we are now aware that our increasingly information-saturated world, coupled with growing expectations of constant availability and immediate responsiveness, place excessive demands on our brains. The consequences are detrimental effects on our safety, health, education, workplace, and relationships with family and friends. Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist and trailblazer in the study of how our brains process information, will take us on a journey into how and why we struggle with interruptions and distractions that emerge from both our inner and outer worlds. He will present a unique evolutionary perspective that the very essence of what has evolved in our brains to make us most human—our ability to set high-level goals —collides headfirst with our brain’s fundamental limitations in cognitive control. He will conclude by offering practical strategies for modifying our behavior, as well as sharing the latest innovations from his research center at UCSF - Neuroscape - in enhancing our brain's function, so that we can better survive and thrive in the information age.

Our lives on this planet have improved in so many amazing ways; notably in terms of our health, longevity, literacy and resources. Despite such significant advances, clear signs are present that our species is struggling in a fundamental way - the strength of our minds. I have come to believe that we are experiencing an emerging, global cognition crisis, presenting itself as a growing lack of high-level attention, emotional regulation, decision making, creativity, empathy, compassion and wisdom. While it has become clear that modern information technology has aggravated this crisis, there is also an untapped potential for it to offer us a solution. I will present an evolutionary and neuroscience perspective on how modern technology has challenged our brains. I will describe an approach I have been advancing over the last twenty years to create and validate personalized, adaptive, interactive experiences designed to achieve meaningful and sustainable cognitive enhancement. I will take you on a dive into my efforts to integrate custom-designed, closed-loop video games with innovations in virtual reality, motion capture, physiological recordings, brain-computer interfaces, non-invasive brain stimulation and artificial intelligence.

Our species is desperately suffering. Despite extraordinary advances in science, technology, and medicine, humans ceaselessly harm one another and our natural world. Somehow, we seem uniquely unsuited to thrive in the very environment that we’ve created. Our brains have simply not kept pace with the rapid transformations to the environment that we introduced, notably the ubiquity of information technology. This will only become more complicated as we find ourselves immersed in convincing virtual realities guided by powerful artificial intelligences. We need to level up our minds to better live with one another and the rest of nature, as well as to effectively address the many crises that threaten our existence. Dr. Gazzaley will share his perspective that all organisms engage in reception-expression cycles with their environment, but humans uniquely have access to a larger breadth of cyclical exchange. A path towards a healthier future with others and the natural world may be achieved by learning how to engage higher cycles of reception and expression (i.e., awareness-intention and empathy-compassion cycles). Thoughtful and consistent engagement in certain experiences, like meditation and nature immersion, facilitate more frequent access to higher levels, which support more meaningful and impactful lives by dissolving the delusion of separation between us and the rest of nature, while simultaneously supporting our species’ long-term survival.