# NeuraVersa Cohort 01 — Full Page Content > This file provides the complete text content of https://www.neuraversa.org/cohort for AI crawlers and LLMs that cannot execute JavaScript. Last updated: April 2026. --- ## Hero **NeuraVersa Cohort 01** 18 scientists. 14 days. Sacred Valley, Peru. 14–28 November 2026. AI-accelerated research methodology combined with psychoactive compounds, designed for scientists ready to produce work that redefines their field. **Investment: $2,500 USD** — Founding cohort rate (future programs $14,950+) - **Date**: 14–28 November 2026 — Sacred Valley, Peru - **Cohort Size**: 18 researchers (maximum) - **Investment**: $2,500 — all-inclusive - **Applications**: Close November 2026 — Rolling acceptance --- ## Program Overview ### 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.** ### A First of Its Kind 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.* --- ## Why Join — The Renaissance of Science We bring exceptional scientists into a triad with advanced AI and consciousness-expanding plant states to suspend dogma and expand cognitive freedom. ### Exceptional Scientists This retreat is designed for exceptional scientists in the Renaissance tradition — those driven not by incremental progress, but by the pursuit of world-changing discovery. Researchers motivated by deep curiosity, intellectual courage, and a responsibility to uplift humanity through insight. ### Consciousness Expansion Through carefully guided consciousness-expanding plant states, scientists temporarily step beyond habitual patterns of thought that constrain conventional problem-solving. These expanded cognitive states allow researchers to perceive new connections, dissolve rigid assumptions, and explore solution spaces that remain inaccessible under ordinary conditions. ### Advanced AI Each participant is paired with an advanced AI scientist capable of researching, simulating, inventing, and exploring hypothesis spaces at unprecedented speed and scale. This AI counterpart continuously challenges assumptions, tests ideas, generates alternative models, and expands the scope of inquiry beyond human cognitive limits. ### The Emergent Intelligence Within the retreat, these three intelligences — human scientific mastery, expanded consciousness, and advanced AI — merge into a single, integrated mode of inquiry. Together, they form a powerful discovery engine that transcends the limitations of traditional scientific practice. --- ## Research Instruments (Plant Medicines) All sessions are clinically supervised, medically monitored, and calibrated individually. ### Node 01 — 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. ### Node 02 — 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. ### Node 03 — 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. ### Node 04 — 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. ### Node 05 — 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. --- ## Facilitation 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. ### Jose Andres Carranza, MD — Doctor, Ancestral & Psychedelic Medicine Jose Andres Carranza, MD, is a general medicine doctor who has spent the past five years studying and actively practicing ancestral medicine alongside psychedelic medicine. His main focus is on harnessing the therapeutic properties of these medicines to treat a wide range of ailments and pathologies. He is an active consultant to plant medicine centers in the Peruvian Amazon, and is himself a practitioner of medicines such as Kambo, Rapé, Sananga, and microdosed Ayahuasca, bringing together the best of both worlds: conventional medicine and alternative plant medicine. ### 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. --- ## 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. --- ## Program Structure — The 14 Days 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. ### Days 1–3: 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 ### Days 4–10: 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 ### Days 11–14: 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 ### 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. --- ## What's Included — $2,500 USD This is a one-time founding cohort rate. Future programs will be $14,950 to $16,950. **Included:** - 14 nights accommodation - 3 to 5 guided psychoactive ceremonies with full medical supervision - Daily facilitation and integration sessions - AI research platform access (through 90 days post-program) - Ground transportation from Cusco - Cusco accommodation if arriving early **Not Included:** - International flights - Travel and health insurance - Personal expenses --- ## 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.* --- ## How to Apply **18 positions. Applications close November 2026 or when filled.** 1. Submit a research interest statement (500 words max) 2. 30-minute screening conversation 3. Medical and psychological assessment 4. Acceptance and deposit ($500 of your $2,500 total, non-refundable) 5. Pre-program prep: platform orientation, reading list, logistics We read every application personally. The statement matters more than your CV. Apply at: https://www.neuraversa.org/cohort --- ## Links - [Cohort Page](https://www.neuraversa.org/cohort) - [Main Site](https://www.neuraversa.org/) - [Privacy Policy](https://www.neuraversa.org/privacy)