Ayahuasca is a beverage used in Amazonian traditional medicine and it has been part of the human experience for millennia as well as other different psychoactive plants. Although Ayahuasca has been proposed as potentially therapeutic as an anxiolytic and antidepressant, whilst no studies have been carried out so far investigating their direct effect on brain emotional processing. This study...
Indigenous psychedelic uses have long been imbricated with colonialism and its afterlives. Amidst tensions from accelerating investor interest in psychedelics and calls to decolonize research and practices, we argue that the study of psychedelics is troubled by dualisms used in both colonial and decolonial thought: subject and object, self and other, culture and nature, synthetic and natural,...
Background: Ayahuasca is a plant tea containing the psychedelic 5-HT2A agonist N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala monoamine-oxidase inhibitors. Acute administration leads to neurophysiological modifications in brain regions of the default mode network, purportedly through a glutamatergic mechanism. Post-acutely, ayahuasca potentiates mindfulness capacities in volunteers and induces rapid and...
Healing methods based on the altered states of consciousness common to spiritual or shamanic traditions escape neuroscientific explanations based on classical physics and classical cognition-denoted here as 'perceptualcognitive' (characteristic of the ordinary state of consciousness) information processing.A second foundation of knowledge-named as 'nonlocal-intuitive' approach-with another way...
Studying the effect of psychedelic substances on expression of creativity is a challenging problem. Our primary objective was to study the psychometric measures of creativity after a series of ayahuasca ceremonies at a time when the acute effects have subsided. The secondary objective was to investigate how entoptic phenomena emerge during expression of creativity. Forty individuals who were...
The current study examined QEEG power and coherence of ayahuasca experiences with two experienced participants in a Brazilian jungle setting. An exploratory case series design was adopted for naturalistic field research. EEGs recorded during visual imagery was compared to eyes-closed baselines. The most important findings were increases in global EEG coherence in the 36-44 Hz and 50-64 Hz...