Neurocarrots

Angie: What is a digital vaccine?

Bhargav: Digital vaccines are an application of gamified virtual reality and artificial intelligence to attempt what is called neurological and immunological modulation. The Digital Vaccine Project has been developed through more than fifteen years of scientific research within an ecosystem led by Carnegie Mellon University that involves several other universities around the world and across the U.S. The question behind it has been “Is it possible that powerful technologies, particularly software, can be designed and used to trigger the body’s immune system?” Can we induce an immune response in the body with just software to actually prevent diseases safely and effectively, and back that up with rigorous scientific evidence?

A: If I understand you correctly, the digital vaccine is a wholly digital intervention targeting specific areas of the brain to alter a person’s neurophysiology in such a way as to generate a preventative, prophylactic effect against certain chronic and communicable diseases.

B: What you see, what you hear, what you touch, your spatial context, changes the physiology of the brain. We can trigger new pathways in the brain through sensory stimuli alone. Downstream of that, we can change the physiology of the body between the brain and the gut. We have shown in randomized control trials improvements in children’s immediate food choices, which, if continued over the lifespan, would then reduce the risk of diabetes, of heart disease, of hypertension. We’ve also begun looking into areas of mental health—anxiety, depression, cognitive decline—all things pertaining to diseases that can be prevented through the brain and the gut. The body is well designed to heal itself, and there are natural mechanisms by which the body keeps disease in check. Digital vaccines are designed to trigger those mechanisms so the body can manage itself, repair itself, and heal itself, preventing or avoiding a whole host of diseases.

A: What is the frequency and duration of exposure or use of the platform—it looks like a video game—that seems to make a difference? Is it something that has to be done on an ongoing basis? Or does a one-time exposure make an impact?

B: What’s the dose? We did a trial in Chennai based on two twenty-minute sessions, and we have a program that specifies thirty minutes once a week for twelve weeks, also tested in Chennai. We’ve also been following participants over a two-year period to look at outcomes including infectious disease and mental health. Once a week is the protocol to get that exposure, to get that reinforcement. The dose is delivered on an iPad or a smartphone or an Android device.

A: This idea of a “dose” measured in time spent interacting with a computer program seems significant to me for how it reframes our conventional idea of what constitutes a medicinal intervention. If a dose is literally administered through interactive screentime, and the protocol is measurably impactful, surely this raises our awareness on some level that our mind is matter, that it’s a physical material directly affected by not only the stimulation of a digital vaccine, but of so much more that we do online without the same kind of deliberation. It’s one thing to agree with this idea in principle for the sake of argument, but it’s another thing to show it experimentally, and then to make a linguistic equivalence between ingesting a pill and spending a few minutes in a video game environment, where we don’t usually think of the stimuli crossing into our bodies in quite the same way, or we at least sustain some doubt about that happening. I wonder how are you gauging the mental health impact—how do we know the digital vaccine is positively modifying the brain?