Increasing meditation efficiency with VR

Meditation, as a mental training for augmenting consciousness (by improving perception, cognition, and life satisfaction with mindful awareness), has been known for thousands of years and has numerous positive associations confirmed by contemporary research. The main issue with meditation seems to be the time it requires for enduring reconfiguration of the brain that leads to lasting benefits, such as the capacity to manage sustained mindfulness (often thousands of hours in meditation sessions). With mechanisms behind meditation increasingly more elucidated, it is time to research optimizations for the meditation procedure. The current theory behind meditation explains it as a process of optimization in the brain’s predictive coding system. This article builds on this theory and describes the utilization of virtual reality for the development of sensory stimulation that seeks to a) facilitate meditation-related insights into the nature of perception, and b) increase the speed of changes in the brain’s predictive models.