What if changing how we experience our bodies could change how we experience anxiety? What if language could reveal when our world is narrowing or opening up? And could dreams, psychedelics, meditation, play, or virtual reality help us see ourselves and the world differently?
Those are some of the questions at the heart of Tiny Blue Dot Foundation’s latest round of research funding: $9 million awarded to 11 new projects exploring the science of perception, consciousness, and mental health.
Spanning institutions in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, this year’s research approaches the Perception Box from remarkably different directions. Studies will explore everything from transformative dreams and psychedelic-assisted therapy to adolescent anxiety, body perception, mindfulness, virtual reality, brain stimulation, and new ways to scientifically measure how perception expands and contracts.
Understanding How Our Perception Box Takes Shape
These studies are part of Tiny Blue Dot Foundation’s broader scientific initiative to investigate the Perception Box™ framework, developed by Elizabeth R. Koch. The framework explores how internal beliefs, cognitive schemas, prior experiences, and other factors shape how we interpret ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
As the scientific research arm of this work, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation supports empirical studies designed to better understand how these perceptual frameworks are constructed and whether and how they can become more flexible.
This is the fourth round of major research funding from Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. Since 2023, the Foundation has supported 45 projects investigating the science of perception and consciousness, with previous research exploring psychedelics, mindfulness, breathwork, virtual reality, dream states, interoception, adolescent mental health, and more.
[Explore Our Research Projects →]
Highlights from the 2026 Cohort
This year’s 11 projects bridge fundamental questions about perception with practical approaches to mental health and well-being. Several focus specifically on adolescents and young adults, a period when patterns of emotion, identity, and perception are still developing.
Some examples of what’s ahead:
Transformative Dreams at Stanford University will investigate whether dreams experienced under anesthesia can be made richer and potentially more transformative by combining propofol with other compounds, including psilocybin, while examining how interactions between the brain and body shape subjective experience. [Study Details →]
Games for Emotion Regulation at Rhode Island Hospital will test a web-based program that uses games, activities, and videos to help middle school students develop emotion regulation skills and explore whether changing young people’s beliefs about their ability to manage emotions can affect mental health and behavior. [Study Details →]
MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for Autistic Young People at the University of Melbourne will investigate whether MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can reduce social anxiety and improve well-being, self-compassion, and openness to new experiences among autistic young people. [Study Details →]
From Body Fear to Body Curiosity at Duke University will use humor, imaginative characters, and playful “body investigations” to help autistic children experiencing abdominal pain approach sensations inside their bodies with curiosity rather than fear. [Study Details →]
Floatation-REST for Adolescent Anxiety and Body Image at UCLA will examine whether reducing external sensory input and helping adolescent girls notice internal sensations differently can loosen rigid patterns around anxiety and body perception. [Study Details →]
Psilocybin, Meditation, and the Brain’s Maps of the Body at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will explore whether psilocybin and body-scan meditation can make the brain’s representations of the body more flexible, potentially offering new insight into how we experience the boundary between ourselves and the outside world. [Study Details →]
Virtual Reality and Brain Training for Pediatric Chronic Pain at UC San Diego will combine immersive virtual reality with real-time EEG neurofeedback to investigate whether children can implicitly develop self-regulation skills that change how they experience and respond to chronic pain. [Study Details →]
Measuring the Perception Box Through Language at Brown University will analyze patterns in tens of thousands of messages to develop a new measure designed to detect when a person’s perception may be expanding or contracting based on the words they use. [Study Details →]
What Comes Next
Across these projects, researchers are asking a common question: How flexible is the reality we experience?
By studying perception through the brain, body, language, technology, altered states, and everyday experience, researchers may help us better understand how our individual worlds are constructed and what allows them to change.
As Elizabeth R. Koch, Co-Founder of Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said in announcing the new grants, the hope is that greater understanding of how our Perception Box functions can create more freedom, possibility, and joy in people’s lives.
With 45 projects now supported across four consecutive funding cycles, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation continues to invest in rigorous, creative science that explores not only how we perceive the world, but how becoming more aware of what shapes that perception might open us to new ways of experiencing ourselves and one another.