Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
James W. Sanders, Raphaël Millière, Ema Demšar et al.
Psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is renowned for inducing highly immersive experiences, often including encounters with seemingly sentient presences. While such phenomena are well documented, immersion under psychedelics remains conceptually underdefined and phenomenologically underexplored. Here we apply micro-phenomenology to characterize immersion under DMT as a structured...
The MIT Press eBooks
December 16, 2025
Ema Demšar, Urban Kordeš
Ema Demar: It was a late summer after noon in 2014, and I was about to start my first serious attempt at meditation.I closed my eyes.I inhaled, and exhaled.I opened a nonjudgmental (or so I tried) attention to whatever was there.What did I notice?A colorful kaleidoscope of bodily sensations, brief images, half-finished spoken sentences; a series of hasty shifts in my focus; the feeling of the...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Daniel J Morris, D Blaise Elliott, Susana Gabriela Torres-Platas et al.
3 citations
The immersive environments of virtual reality (VR) have potential to engender a vast range of experiences. Although participants recognize these experiences as artificial, the consequences can still be profound. Compared to VR, lucid dreams-characterized by awareness that one is dreaming-potentially allow for even more expansive explorations of immersive multisensory experience. Furthermore,...
PsyArXiv
December 29, 2024
James W. Sanders, Raphaël Millière, Zachary G. Daily et al.
4 citations
preprint
DMT reliably induces profound experiences of immersion in other worlds and encounters with seemingly autonomous presences, yet the lived qualities and unfolding of these experiences remain poorly understood. Using micro-phenomenological interviews with twenty-three healthy participants who received DMT during fMRI scanning, this study explores how these experiences arise and develop in...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 1, 2024
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez, Ema Demšar et al.
14 citations
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Little is known about the neurophysiology of spontaneous OBEs, which are often reported by healthy individuals as occurring during states of reduced vigilance, particularly in proximity to or during sleep (sleep-related OBEs). In this paper, we review the current state of...
Frontiers in Psychology
June 10, 2022
Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez, Ema Demšar, Teresa Campillo-Ferrer et al.
25 citations
Recent years have seen a heightened focus on the study of minimal forms of awareness during sleep to advance the study of consciousness and understand what makes a state conscious. This focus draws on an increased interest in anecdotical descriptions made by classic Indian philosophical traditions about unusual forms of awareness during sleep. For instance, in the so-called state of...
Ema Demšar, Jennifer Windt
In this chapter, we present the problem of dream reports in philosophy and empirical research, examine how the variability of methods and measures influences research results, and suggest that research on the phenomenological features of dreaming could benefit from insights from first-person methods in consciousness research. We consider two interview-based methods developed for acquiring...