NeuraVersa Cohort 01
18 scientists. 14 days. Sacred Valley, Peru. November 2026.
AI-accelerated research methodology combined with psychoactive compounds, designed for scientists ready to produce work that redefines their field.
$2,500 USD — Founding cohort rate (future programs $14,950+)
November 2026
Sacred Valley, Peru
18 researchers
maximum
$2,500
all-inclusive
Close November 2026
Rolling acceptance
You Already Know
You've had
the experience.
Maybe on your own, maybe accidentally, maybe once, maybe dozens of times.
A moment where everything you'd been studying suddenly rearranged itself into a pattern you could never have reached through analysis alone.
And then you went back to the lab. And you couldn't tell anyone where the idea actually came from.
Kekulé dreamed the benzene ring and told the story decades later. Kary Mullis credited LSD for visualizing the polymerase chain reaction, and spent the rest of his career being dismissed for it. Crick. McClintock. The list is long.
The pattern is always the same: the insight arrives through a door that the scientific establishment pretends doesn't exist.
You already know this door is real. You've walked through it. The problem was never whether it works. The problem was that there's no infrastructure on the other side.
No documentation protocol. No AI capable of cross-referencing what you experienced against the literature in real time. No cohort of peers doing the same work simultaneously, surfacing patterns none of you could find alone.
That's what we built.
Research Programme
A First of Its Kind
Let's get something out of the way.
The psychedelic retreat world is full of programs designed to help people heal trauma, find themselves, or work through personal crises. That work has value. It's not what we do.
NeuraVersa is a research program. You're not here to be fixed. You're here because you don't need fixing, and you're ready to aim that clarity at the biggest questions in your field.
We work with psychoactive compounds that are now the subject of serious research at institutions like Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, and MAPS: psilocybin, DMT (via Ayahuasca), mescaline (via San Pedro), and 5-MeO-DMT (Bufo). But unlike clinical settings, we use them within traditional Shipibo ceremonial frameworks, which provide something a lab protocol can't: sustained, guided navigation of expanded cognitive states over hours, not minutes.
In this context, these compounds are research instruments. The ceremonies aren't therapeutic sessions. They're controlled expansions of perceptual territory, paired with AI infrastructure that captures, maps, and pressure-tests everything that emerges.
There are no integration circles where people share feelings and go home lighter. There are documentation protocols, peer review sessions, and an AI agent that will have more to say about your findings than most postdocs.
If you're looking for healing, there are excellent programs for that.
If you're looking for discovery, keep reading.
Ayahuasca
Banisteriopsis caapi & Psychotria viridis
Synergistic DMT and β-carboline MAO inhibitors producing prolonged heightened perception and systems-level insight. Alters default mode network organization, enhancing cognitive flexibility and cross-domain synthesis for novel conceptual connections.
Bufo
5-MeO-DMT
Rapid-acting tryptamine inducing complete ego-dissolution and non-dual awareness within minutes. Suspends self-referential cognition via 5-HT1A and sigma-1 pathways, enabling radically novel perspectives on fundamental questions.
Psilocybin
Psilocybe cubensis
Facilitates targeted neural reorganization and dendritic connectivity in prefrontal-associative regions. Loosens rigid cognitive priors, enabling alternative mental models and insight-driven breakthroughs via 5-HT2A plasticity pathways.
San Pedro
Mescaline
Long-duration phenethylamine offering gradual, stable perceptual expansion. Extended time course enables sustained engagement with complex questions, enhanced pattern recognition, and integrative insight for deep conceptual work.
Vilca
Anadenanthera colubrina
Bufotenine-dominant preparation accessing expanded awareness and visionary cognition. Distinct serotonergic profile supports altered perceptual frameworks and novel interpretive lenses for reframing entrenched assumptions.
What NeuraVersa Actually Is
Three forces working together across 14 days.
You
Your expertise, your questions, your years of pattern recognition in your field.
You bring the depth.
The AI Agent
A purpose-built scientific discoveries agent, developed over the past year and tested with five researchers. This cohort is the first full-scale deployment: 18 simultaneous users across 14 days of intensive investigation.
It does literature mapping in hours that would take you weeks. It extracts patterns from your session documentation in real time. It challenges your assumptions, generates alternative models, and helps you develop new research directions you wouldn't have reached alone.
It brings the breadth.
Guided Psychoactive Sessions
3 to 5 ceremonies over the 14 days, working with psilocybin, DMT (Ayahuasca), mescaline (San Pedro), 5-MeO-DMT (Bufo), or other combinations from our botanical framework. Protocols are determined individually by our facilitation team based on your research objectives, prior experience, and physiology.
These sessions move you past the habitual patterns of thought that constrain conventional problem-solving. Not in a vague, "expand your consciousness" sense. In the specific, practical sense that your default cognitive architecture filters out entire classes of connections, and temporarily lifting those filters is how Kekulé, Mullis, and others accessed the ideas that defined their careers.
That's the access.
Human scientific depth. AI-scale computational power. Perceptual access to the territory where your most important ideas have always come from.
Together, they produce a discovery engine that none of them could be alone.
Who This Is For (and Who It Isn't)
This is for researchers who already live at the edge of their field.
The ones whose most interesting ideas get raised eyebrows from colleagues. The ones who've sensed for years that the deepest questions in their discipline can't be answered by the tools their discipline provides. The ones who have privately explored altered states and know there's something real there, but had no framework to turn it into rigorous output.
Physics, AI, Biology, Neuroscience, Mathematics, Engineering, Philosophy of Science — the discipline matters less than the orientation.
What we look for:
An active research agenda that pushes boundaries
Comfort with ambiguity, complexity, and not knowing
Willingness to document everything (this is what separates research from tourism)
The ethical backbone to use what you discover for the benefit of others
Prior experience with psychoactive compounds is not required. Intellectual courage is.
We are not looking for "balanced" and "prudent." We are looking for scientists who are done pretending that the most interesting territory in their field can be reached through conventional means alone.
If your first instinct reading this page is to calculate reputational risk, this probably isn't for you.
If your first instinct is "finally," it probably is.
PROGRAM
The 14 Days
Research Design & Baseline
- AI research environment orientation
- Initial hypothesis formulation from your existing work
- Medical and physiological baseline
- First ceremony (protocol determined individually)
- Post-session documentation and initial AI analysis
Iterative Investigation
- Daily AI-assisted data extraction from subjective reports
- Refinement of research questions based on what you're finding
- Literature integration and hypothesis testing
- 2 to 3 additional sessions based on emerging research directions
- Peer review sessions with your cohort
Synthesis
- Complete documentation review with AI analysis
- Final ceremony if your trajectory warrants it
- Draft research summaries and methodological notes
- Cohort knowledge synthesis
- 90-day post-program platform access setup
Every day produces research output. The AI handles the heavy lifting (documentation, pattern recognition, literature mapping) so you can focus on the thinking that only you can do.
Outcomes
What You Leave With
By Day 14:
A refined research question or hypothesis shaped by both computational analysis and direct phenomenological investigation
Structured documentation: session logs, AI-extracted patterns, literature connections, emerging theoretical frameworks
Draft research summaries ready to develop into publications, grant proposals, or new experimental designs
90 days of continued access to the NeuraVersa AI platform
You leave with research assets. Not stories about how the jungle changed your life. Work you can build on.
Why 14 Days
Our 30-day residential program remains the core NeuraVersa offering. This compressed cohort exists because not every researcher can disappear for a month, and because we're testing a hypothesis: with the right AI infrastructure, can 14 days of intensive work produce insights comparable to extended programs?
This is also the first time we're deploying the AI agent at full scale. 18 researchers, 18 AI counterparts, 14 days, working simultaneously. Nobody has done this before. We want to see what happens when cross-domain findings start colliding in real time.
Founding cohort members get priority consideration for future long-term programs and lifetime access to the NeuraVersa research commons as it develops.
Facilitation Team
Facilitation Team
Dawid, who has facilitated more than 1000 ceremonies, Grażyna, a medical professional, Elisa, a Shipibo Meraya healer, and our assistant team. Experienced professionals combining traditional wisdom with scientific rigor.
Grażyna Opowicz, MD
Lead Doctor
Grażyna Opowicz MD is an anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist serving as Lead Doctor for the NeuraVersa Cohort. She trained at the Medical University of Gdańsk, completed her residency in Kraków with advanced training in Paris, and obtained her specialist title in 2018. She has worked across major hospitals in France and Poland in anesthesia, critical care, and trauma medicine. She is a certified hypnotherapist trained at the Psynapse School of Hypnosis in hypnotherapy and regressive hypnotherapy, and a member of the Polish Psychedelic Society. At NeuraVersa she oversees the medical framework of the Cohort with a focus on safety and clinical rigor.
Dawid Rakowski
Lead Ceremony Facilitator
Dawid Rakowski has been using plant medicine for over 25 years, the last 7 years working as a professional facilitator with thousands of people from all over the world. He has sat in over a thousand ceremonies, spent 3 years training in the jungle with the indigenous Shipibo shamans. He's a musician, retreat, and conscious festival organizer. He holds space with compassion and grounding, and his vast knowledge of plant medicine is a great support for transformation. As a researcher, he has also ghost written educational content for Dennis McKenna reaching 20 million people and shared research with Graham Hancock, exploring ancient use of psychedelic plants.
Elisa Vargas Fernández
Maestra
Elisa Vargas Fernández, also known as "Reshin Wesna" in Shipibo, is a Peruvian native born in the community of San Francisco, Ucayali Department. She hails from the honorable Shipibo Konibo lineage and fluently speaks and writes the Shipibo language. As a native healer (Meraya) of the Shipibo ethnicity, Elisa carries on the healing traditions of her ancestors. Through ayahuasca sessions, she connects with intangible dimensions and shares cosmic visions with her patients. Using Icaros, she helps others comprehend the interconnection with our ecosystem, promoting healing of mental and physical ailments. Elisa's profound knowledge of medicinal plants has taken her on journeys across Peru to Lima, Cusco, Iquitos, and Tarapoto. She has also been invited to international destinations, including Argentina, Korea, Mexico, Slovenia, and Taiwan, where she conducts ayahuasca ceremonies for those studying and researching healing plants in nature.
Highlands Base
Mountain Retreat Center
Facility & Logistics
Facility & Location
Mountain retreat center in Peru's Sacred Valley. 90 minutes from Cusco. 3,200m elevation. Private ceremony spaces, dedicated work areas.
No distractions. No tourists. No ambient noise from someone else's healing journey. This is a research facility that happens to sit in one of the most powerful landscapes on the planet.
What's Included
$2,500 USD
This is a one-time founding cohort rate. Future programs will be $14,950 to $16,950.
Not Included
How to Apply
Submit a research interest statement (500 words max)
30-minute screening conversation
Medical and psychological assessment
Acceptance and deposit ($500 of your $2,500 total, non-refundable)
Pre-program prep: platform orientation, reading list, logistics
18 positions. Applications close November 2026 or when filled.
We read every application personally. The statement matters more than your CV.
For Founders
Founders, Operators, Closed Cohorts
NeuraVersa was built for scientists, but the mental work of investigating unanswered questions isn't exclusive to research. Founders building category-defining companies face the same challenge: pursuing something important that existing frameworks can't support.
Founders, CEOs, and operators who approach their work with the same rigor scientists bring to their fields are welcome to apply. The criteria remain the same: pursuing questions that can't be reached through conventional means alone, documenting what you find, and applying it toward something larger than yourself.
For leadership teams or research groups working on a shared question: We run closed cohorts as custom programs at the same Sacred Valley facility. Group size, timeline, and AI infrastructure are designed around your specific challenge.
For closed cohort inquiries
team@neuraversa.org