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By an artful weaving of scholarship, diverse video clips, and a realtime projected Twitter1 feed that provided ongoing audience reactions to the panel's unfolding, Phillip Freeman, with the help of fellow panelists Stephen Hartman, Glen Gabbard, and Vera Camden created a highly engaging educational, experiential, and consciousness-raising experience about that complex and highly diverse aggregate of phenomena subsumed under the term virtual reality. Given the panel's great breadth, the number of intriguing ideas and observations that were introduced, and the clinical relevance of the papers, this report can present but a few of the many significant ideas that were conveyed.
Following her introduction of the panelists, moderator Vera Camden framed the afternoon's discussion by noting the extraordinary speed with which technological advances have created a new world, the world of cyberspace, a world that has significant effects on the nature of human subjectivity. Camden referenced Katherine Hayles's recent work on the “posthuman” (2012), which stresses that human interdependence with technology and the cyberworld has had an inevitable formative effect on human psychology, perhaps generating a new kind of consciousness: “when my computer goes down,” she writes, “or my Internet connection fails, I feel lost, disoriented, unable to work—in fact, I feel as if my hands