New Grants for Groundbreaking Perception Box Research
How do young people perceive their inner and outer worlds, and how can we help them feel stronger, clearer, and more connected? That is the focus of Tiny Blue Dot Foundation’s latest round of research funding: $9 million awarded to 11 new projects exploring the frontiers of adolescent mental health, consciousness, and perception.
Spanning institutions in the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and Australia, this year’s funded studies explore a remarkable variety of innovative and low-cost approaches. These include psilocybin therapy for grief, video games powered by heart-brain signals, dialogue training for college students, and virtual body image tools co-designed with teens.
A Global Effort to Rethink Adolescent Well-Being
These studies are part of a broader scientific initiative to investigate the Perception Box™ framework, developed by Elizabeth R. Koch, which posits that internal beliefs and lived experiences shape how individuals interpret reality. The Foundation supports empirical research that aims to better understand how perception works and how it can shift to support mental health, emotional resilience, and human connection.
This is the third year of major funding from Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. Previous cycles supported research on topics like mindfulness, psychedelics, breathwork, dream states, and compassion-based approaches to bias.
Explore 2023 & 2024 Projects →
Highlights from the 2025 Cohort
This year’s projects focus heavily on youth mental health, with 9 of the 11 centered on children, adolescents, and young adults. Each selected project will receive up to $900,000 over three years. The new cohort was chosen through a competitive global application process, with close to 300 proposals reviewed under a double-blind system.
Some examples of what’s ahead:
Independence-Focused Therapy from NYU explores how small acts of autonomy can reduce childhood anxiety. The study will test a low-cost treatment designed to meet rising demand for youth mental health support. [include link to project page]
Psilocybin for Prolonged Grief (University of Virginia and Lund University) investigates how a guided psychedelic session may help people process unresolved loss. [include link to project page]
Mindfulness Video Games (Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies) use heart-brain biofeedback to guide teens into meditative states, helping them regulate emotions without needing formal meditation training. [include link to project page]
VR Therapy for Trauma and Body Image (Wayne State, CAMH, and Cairnmillar Institute) brings immersive technology into therapeutic settings to help teens rebuild self-image and process fear in safe, controlled environments. [include link to project page]
School-Based Mental Health Programs (Brown, MGH, Beth Israel Deaconess) integrate mindfulness, interoceptive awareness, and community-wide support for students facing stress, anxiety, or depression. [include link to project page]
Dialogue Training at UCLA will test whether college freshmen can learn to stay calm and constructive when engaging with someone who strongly disagrees with them. [include link to project page]
Artificial Intelligence for Altered States (Lund University) uses machine learning to build a scientific classification of non-ordinary states of consciousness based on people’s personal descriptions. [include link to project page]
What Comes Next
Preliminary results from these studies are expected by late 2026, with findings to be shared through academic publications and public reports. With this new round of funding, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation continues its mission to support rigorous, creative science that helps people understand how they perceive the world, and how those perceptions can shift toward greater clarity, connection, and well-being.