What Are Cyberdelics? How Light, Sound & Vibration Induce Altered States Without Substances

How vibroacoustic therapy, brainwave entrainment, and stroboscopic light are creating non-pharmacological pathways to altered states of consciousness

There's a revolution happening at the intersection of technology and consciousness. It doesn't require a prescription. It doesn't involve illegal substances. And it's completely within your control.

Welcome to the world of cyberdelics.

Cyberdelic technologies use light, sound, and vibration to induce altered states of consciousness, deep relaxation, and even psychedelic-like experiences without ingesting anything at all. They actually work. I've experienced it firsthand, and it's a core part of why I started Zenthesia™.

What Exactly Are Cyberdelics?

The term "cyberdelics" fuses "cyber" and "psychedelics." You may also see the term technodelics used interchangeably. In a 2023 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researcher Ido Hartogsohn defines cyberdelics as "technologies designed to produce altered states of consciousness (ASC) such as presence, awe, and transcendence, considered hallmarks of the mystical-type states afforded by psychedelics." These are technologies that shift brain activity into states that mirror or complement psychedelic experiences, without any chemical compounds.

The concept isn't entirely new. Humans have used rhythmic drumming, chanting, and flickering firelight to induce trance states for thousands of years. What's new is the precision. Modern cyberdelic technologies can target specific brainwave frequencies with accuracy our ancestors couldn't have imagined, creating reproducible experiences that range from deep relaxation to full-blown visual journeys rivaling substance-induced states. The broader cyberdelic landscape includes virtual reality, neurofeedback, and even aromatherapy devices, but the most powerful and accessible implementations center on three sensory pathways: stroboscopic light through vision, vibroacoustic therapy through touch, and auditory entrainment through sound.

The underlying principle is simple: any technology that can modulate your senses with enough precision can shift your state of consciousness. The cyberdelic toolkit works across multiple sensory channels simultaneously:

• Vibroacoustics and Tactile Sound [Touch]: Sound converted into physical vibration via tactile transducers, felt through the body rather than heard. These vibrations activate mechanoreceptors deep in the skin, joints, and connective tissue, shifting the nervous system toward deep rest.
• Stroboscopic Light [Vision]: Flickering light delivered through closed eyelids at controlled frequencies, synchronizing brainwave activity to the flash rate and generating vivid geometric visuals, color fields, and complex internal imagery.
• Binaural Beats and Isochronic Tones [Sound]: Auditory methods of brainwave entrainment that leverage the frequency following response to guide the brain toward specific states.
• Music [Sound]: Music activates more simultaneous brain regions than almost any other stimulus. In altered states, it doesn't just accompany the experience. It shapes the trajectory of it in real time.

When these modalities are layered, the results can be extraordinary. Each additional sensory channel deepens the experience and accelerates the shift in consciousness.

Why Cyberdelics? Why Now?

Interest in psychedelics has surged. Research into their therapeutic potential for depression, PTSD, anxiety, and addiction has entered mainstream conversation. But psychedelics aren't accessible or appropriate for everyone. They require careful preparation, supervised settings, significant time, and depending on where you live, may not be legal.

Cyberdelics offer a different path:

• Complete control: You can stop the experience instantly. No waiting for a substance to metabolize.
• Repeatability: Sessions can be precisely reproduced. Return to a specific state whenever you choose.
• Accessibility: No prescriptions, no legal gray areas, no mandatory guide or sitter.
• Daily integration: A 30-minute session fits into a lunch break. Expanded states can be explored consistently without disrupting your responsibilities.
• Safety profile: No risk of overdose, chemical dependency, or lasting adverse effects when used as directed.

This doesn't mean cyberdelics replace psychedelics. Many practitioners use them as complementary tools for preparation before ceremonies, integration afterward, or maintaining connection to expanded states between sessions. Others find cyberdelics provide everything they're seeking without substances at all.

The Frequency Following Response: How Entrainment Works

Brainwave entrainment is the principle that external rhythmic stimuli can guide brainwave activity toward matching frequencies. Expose the brain to a consistent 10 Hz flicker, and it tends to synchronize toward that frequency. Neuroscientists call this the frequency following response (FFR), and it is the foundational mechanism behind stroboscopic light, binaural beats, and isochronic tones alike. Present a rhythm through any sensory channel with enough consistency and intensity, and the brain will follow.

The brain operates at different frequency bands depending on your state of consciousness:

Stroboscopic Light: Entrainment Through Vision

Stroboscopic light devices take brainwave entrainment further than audio methods alone. Flickering light through closed eyelids stimulates the visual cortex directly, producing vivid internal experiences like geometric patterns, colors, and complex imagery while simultaneously guiding brainwave activity. If you've read my Lumenate review, you know I've been exploring this space for years. The most intense sessions target specific frequency combinations that produce experiences ranging from gentle kaleidoscopic visuals to full immersive journeys rivaling anything substance-induced.

Binaural Beats and Isochronic Tones: Entrainment Through Sound

The FFR works through the ears as well as the eyes. Binaural beats present a slightly different frequency to each ear, say 200 Hz in the left and 210 Hz in the right, and the brain perceives the 10 Hz difference as a phantom tone it begins to entrain to. Isochronic tones take a more direct approach, pulsing a single frequency on and off at the target rate. Both methods can be layered with stroboscopic light to reinforce entrainment across multiple sensory channels simultaneously.

The Somatic Pathway: Vibroacoustic Therapy and Tactile Sound

Vibroacoustic therapy and tactile sound operate through a fundamentally different mechanism than entrainment. Rather than guiding brainwave frequencies through the FFR, they work through the body's somatosensory system, activating mechanoreceptors directly and shifting the nervous system through physical sensation.

Vibroacoustic Therapy (VAT)

VAT focuses on low-frequency pure tone vibrations between 30Hz to 120Hz that are transmitted through the body via tactile transducers, activating Pacinian corpuscles and other mechanoreceptors throughout the tissues. The body interprets these coherent vibrations as signals of safety, shifting the nervous system out of sympathetic "fight or flight" activation into parasympathetic states of deep rest. In particular 40 Hz stimulation has attracted significant scientific interest for its potential cognitive and neurological benefits.

Tactile Sound: Full-Spectrum Immersion

Vibroacoustic therapy targets specific low-frequency ranges for specific physiological outcomes. But the tactile transducers in a high-fidelity sound bed reproduce far more than pure tone therapeutic frequencies. They reproduce the full complexity of music.

This distinction matters. When a sound bed has enough power and frequency range to faithfully reproduce a full musical signal through the body, something shifts. The bass line you hear through headphones is the same bass line you feel rolling through your spine. A cymbal shimmer arrives in your ears at the same instant a corresponding vibration reaches your fingertips. The brain receives the same musical information through two separate sensory systems, auditory and somatosensory, and fuses them. What you hear and what you feel become one continuous perception.

This is where equipment fidelity becomes essential rather than optional. Low-wattage devices with consumer grade transducers can deliver a narrow band of therapeutic frequencies, and that has value. That said, they can't reproduce music with enough accuracy for the body's felt experience to match what the ears are hearing. When there's a gap, a mismatch in timing, frequency content, or dynamic range, the brain registers the discrepancy and the immersion breaks. When the signals match, the music stops being something you listen to and becomes something you inhabit.

The Compound Effect: When Entrainment Meets Somatic Immersion

When stroboscopic light entrainment and vibroacoustic therapy are experienced together, the effects don't just add up. They multiply. The vibroacoustic foundation grounds you in embodied sensation while the light opens perceptual doorways. Layer in music through headphones and you've engaged touch, sight, and hearing simultaneously. Add scent to the environment and the olfactory system joins, its direct neural pathway to the amygdala and hippocampus deepening immersion without any conscious effort.

When multiple sensory systems receive coherent, complementary signals simultaneously, the brain begins integrating them into a unified perceptual experience. The boundaries between what you're seeing, hearing, and feeling start to blur. This is a form of induced synesthesia, and it's one of the reasons multi-sensory cyberdelic experiences feel so much more profound than any single modality alone. The name Zenthesia™ itself comes from this idea: the fusion of zen and synesthesia. A state of calm, unified perception where the senses converge.

This is the core principle behind everything we build. The more sensory channels you engage with precision, the deeper the shift. Not because more is always better, but because coherent multi-sensory input gives the brain a richer, more complete signal to entrain to.

The Zenthesia™ Approach: Why Equipment Quality Matters

My journey into this space began in 2020 during therapeutic sessions with ketamine. I discovered something that changed my understanding of consciousness work: music doesn't just accompany altered states. It shapes them. Each note, each frequency, each vibration was painting the experience in real time.

This led me to vibroacoustic technology. I wanted to know what would happen if sound wasn't just heard but felt. Transmitted directly through the body. I tried existing vibroacoustic devices, and nothing quite delivered. They lacked the power, fidelity, and broad frequency support required for truly deep immersion. So I began experimenting and eventually built my own.

The Zenthesia™ Sound Therapy Bed 2 emerged from that experimentation and continued iteration. It's a vibroacoustic platform powered by a 600-watt professional amplifier driving 4 high-fidelity tactile transducers, covering 10 Hz to 1000 Hz, the full breadth of tactile audio perception. This system was engineered to reproduce music exactly as it was created, in the form of tactile sound. Not the muddy approximation that low-wattage consumer devices produce. The difference is not subtle. It's the difference between hearing a symphony through a cheap Bluetooth speaker and sitting in the concert hall.

The experience produced is transcendent. And embodied. Consciousness exploration anchored in the body rather than dissociated from it.

Why the roXiva® RX1

The next question was what to pair with it. I researched every stroboscopic light device on the market, including the Lucia N°03, the NeuroVIZR, the Atom Light, and several lesser-known options. I chose the roXiva® RX1, and the reasons come down to three things: its LED architecture, its session design philosophy, and its audio integration.

The RX1 uses 16 high-CRI LEDs arranged in 4 independent groups that can flicker at different frequencies simultaneously. This means the RX1 can entrain multiple brainwave states at the same time, layering a deep theta foundation with gamma accents, for example, or creating complex interference patterns that produce richer visual experiences than any single-frequency device can achieve. Most competing lights use a single LED array or a central halogen bulb that can only target one frequency at a time. The RX1's four-group architecture opens up a much wider palette of neurological states.

Then there are the sessions themselves. The RX1 ships with over 150 pre-programmed sessions, with more released through regular software updates. Each session is built from EEG research into what the brain actually looks like during specific altered states, from deep meditation and hypnagogic trance to the characteristic brainwave signatures observed during psychedelic experiences. The session designers identify those neural patterns and reverse-engineer light and sound frequencies to guide the brain toward reproducing them. The result is a fully composed experience with synchronized audio: purpose-built music, binaural beats, isochronic tones, and low-frequency sound design, all choreographed to the light patterns. Some of the most intense sessions were created in direct collaboration with music artists and sound designers who specialize in consciousness-oriented audio. Every element is designed to guide the brain through a specific experiential trajectory.

The reason the RX1 integrates so well with the Zenthesia™ sound bed is its audio output. The RX1's 3.5mm stereo output feeds into the bed's amplifier as well as dedicated headphones. This means every roXiva® session is not just heard. It's felt through the entire body via the bed's tactile transducers. A 40 Hz gamma tone isn't just stimulating your auditory cortex. It's vibrating through your tissues, activating mechanoreceptors, reinforcing the entrainment signal through a completely separate sensory pathway. The same coherent signal reaching the brain through light, sound, and tactile vibration simultaneously.

What Does a Cyberdelic Session Feel Like?

Experiences vary based on session type, individual neurochemistry, and intention. Here's what users commonly report:

Crucially, you remain in control throughout. If a journey becomes too intense, you can simply stop the session. There's no commitment to riding out an experience for hours. This makes cyberdelic technology approachable for people who are curious about expanded states but hesitant about the loss of control that substances involve.

Cyberdelics vs. Psychedelics: A Comparison

This isn't about one being better than the other. They serve different purposes, and many people use both. But the practical differences matter:

Amplifying Low Doses: Cyberdelics as a Psychedelic Multiplier

One of the more interesting anecdotes we hear from users involves combining cyberdelic technology with low or micro doses of psychedelics. This isn't something we advocate for or against, but it's a practice that comes up often enough in conversation that it's worth addressing.

The reports are consistent. A microdose or low dose on its own might produce subtle shifts in perception, a slight loosening of mental patterns, a gentle opening. For many people it's not enough to break through into a meaningfully altered state, and they can function normally through their daily activities. But users report that when that same low dose meets a cyberdelic technology session, the subtle effects are significantly amplified. Within a curated cyberdelic journey, what might have been a barely perceptible shift becomes a much more powerful activation.

Those who explore this approach describe several practical advantages. The dose stays low enough to maintain significant control and orientation throughout. Sessions can be kept to a much shorter time frame rather than the four to eight hours a full dose requires. The come-up is gentler, the experience is more guided, and integration is simpler because they were present and grounded the entire time.

We also hear from practitioners experienced with higher-dose psychedelic work who use cyberdelic technology during the integration period, days and weeks after a session, to revisit and anchor insights from their journey. The body remembers. A cyberdelic session can bring back somatic or visionary echoes of the experience in a way that purely cognitive integration cannot.

To be clear: Zenthesia™ does not advocate or endorse these practices, and the legal status of these compounds varies by jurisdiction. Our technology is designed to be powerful on its own. But we believe in being transparent about how people are actually using these tools, and the anecdotal reports from this intersection are worth knowing about.

Intention, Coherence, and Coming Home

The most sophisticated cyberdelic equipment in the world won't take you very far without intention. This is something the ceremonial traditions have understood for thousands of years, and it's just as true with technology as it is with plant medicine.

Across diverse ceremonial practices, common threads emerge: setting clear intentions, creating dedicated space, using rhythmic sound, incorporating visual elements, and often including scent. These weren't aesthetic choices. They were technologies of consciousness in their own right, designed to engage multiple senses simultaneously and direct awareness inward.

Cyberdelic practice inherits this wisdom. Setting an intention before a session. Curating the physical space with care. Choosing music and session programs that match what you're working with, not just what sounds interesting. Taking time afterward to sit with what came up rather than immediately returning to your phone. These are the practices that turn a technology demo into a genuine consciousness practice.

I also want to be clear about something. This isn't just biohacking. We're not trying to optimize productivity or hack our way to better performance metrics. That framing misses what cyberdelics actually offer.

What we're doing is tuning. The human nervous system, like any instrument, can fall out of coherence. Stressed, fragmented, disconnected. Cyberdelic technologies offer a way to come back into resonance. Not to become something other than what you are, but to remember what you are when the noise settles.

The experiences these technologies enable aren't goals to achieve. They're doorways. What matters is what you bring back: the integration, the insight, the remembered capacity for presence that stays with you after the session ends.

That's what we're building at Zenthesia™. Not escape pods, but specialized instruments for coming home to yourself.

Who Are Cyberdelics For?

Personal explorers: Anyone curious about consciousness, meditation, or expanded states. No prior experience required.

Meditators: Practitioners looking to break through plateaus or access specific states more reliably. Brainwave entrainment and vibroacoustic immersion can compress years of training into dramatically shorter sessions.

Wellness practitioners and retreat centers: Therapists, coaches, bodyworkers, and healers incorporating consciousness technology into their offerings. Cyberdelic technologies are increasingly appearing in spas, wellness centers, and retreat facilities as high-value, differentiated experiences.

Psychedelic integration specialists: Those working with plant medicines who need tools for preparation, integration, and maintaining connection to insights between ceremonies.

People seeking non-pharmaceutical nervous system support: Vibroacoustic therapy and delta brainwave entrainment can be profoundly calming for those dealing with chronic stress, anxiety, or trauma responses, all without medication.

Creatives and professionals: Artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and anyone seeking enhanced creativity, flow states, or fresh perspectives.

Getting Started with Cyberdelic Technology

What Your First Session Looks Like

You lie down on the sound bed and cover yourself with a weighted blanket. Headphones go on. If you're using the roXiva®, it's positioned above your face at a comfortable distance. You close your eyes. The session begins gently, easing you in before building in intensity. There's nothing to learn, no technique to master. The technology does the work. Your only job is to relax and let the experience unfold.

If anything becomes too intense, you can reduce the vibration intensity, cover your eyes, or end the session entirely. Afterward, most people want to sit quietly for a few minutes. The calm tends to linger.

Entry Points

Each component in our lineup is a complete experience on its own, and either one can be your starting point depending on what draws you in:

Start with sound and sensation: The Zenthesia™ Sound Therapy Bed is an immersive, grounded experience. You feel the music move through your body. It anchors you in physical sensation, dissolves tension, and shifts your nervous system into deep rest. For many people this is the foundation of their practice, and it's our most popular product for both personal use and professional settings.

Start with light and vision: The roXiva® RX1 is a more visual, expansive experience. It opens perceptual doorways through stroboscopic light entrainment, producing vivid internal imagery and guiding brainwave states across over 150 session programs. If you're drawn to the psychedelic and visionary side of cyberdelics, this is where that lives.

Combine both: Our Cyberdelic Bundle pairs the two at significant savings. The RX1's audio feeds directly through the bed, so every session becomes a fully integrated light, sound, and vibration experience. Grounded and expansive at the same time.

Frequently Asked Questions About Cyberdelics

This technology changed the course of my life. I went from discovering it to building a company around it because I couldn't not share it. If any of this resonates, I'd love to talk. I genuinely enjoy these conversations.

Reach me directly at (512) 814-5715 or through our contact page.