We trust our perceptions to be accurate depictions of the world, which we conceive as “Reality”, but common neuropsychiatric symptoms such as hallucinations and illusions challenge this conviction. Those conditions echo the fundamental philosophical question of “How do we know what is real”?
We tackle this question via a specialized virtual reality environment allowing us to create parametrically controlled virtual Hallucinations. Through this platform, we are building a phenomenological and computational model of the Sense of Reality (SoR), which will be used as a framework to investigate the neural mechanisms of SoR in neuro-typical and altered states of consciousness.