Philosophical Psychology
September 26, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Liam Korošec Hudnik, Anja Levačić et al.
1 citation
People who microdosed psilocybin on their own reported loosening of mental structures, such as less intense thoughts and a more tangential stream of consciousness, along with increased sensitivity to external stimuli that could make mundane activities more interesting or lead to sensory overload. Flexible cognition increased while stable cognition decreased, and some ego-dystonic contents emerged. The experience was appraised more positively in highly structured environments. Momentary assessments and retrospective interviews gave different accounts, highlighting the need for systematic mixed methods studies to characterize the lived experience of low-dose psilocybin.
March 20, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Liam Korošec Hudnik, Anja Levačić et al.
1 citation
preprint
Psilocybin microdosing loosens mental structures, making thoughts less intense and thinking more flexible but less stable, while increasing the salience of external stimuli—sometimes making mundane activities more interesting, sometimes causing sensory overload. The experience is appraised more positively in highly structured environments. Momentary ecological assessments and retrospective interviews gave completely opposite accounts of the experience, highlighting profound methodological challenges in microdosing research. The findings relate to stable versus flexible cognition and the concept of salience, underscoring the need for systematic mixed-methods studies to better characterize the lived experience of psilocybin microdosing.
Brain Sciences
January 7, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Sara Rigler, Liam Korošec Hudnik et al.
Patients with affective disorders experience emotional stimuli in laboratory tasks not as isolated events but as part of a complex, temporally unfolding process that can persist and blend across trials, a phenomenon termed impressionability. Two distinct alterations in affectivity were identified: affective enchantment, where intense emotions combine with superstitious thinking, and disintwinement, a sense of detachment and emotional blunting. Standardized image-based tasks often fail to elicit authentic spontaneous emotional responses in clinical populations, limiting their ecological validity. The findings underscore the need for experimental designs that capture the subtle, dynamic nature of altered affectivity, including vital feelings, to better understand emotion dysregulation.
Frontiers in Psychiatry
January 1, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Sara Rigler, Nika Kovačič et al.
Ruminations are persistent, repetitive, distressing thoughts about negative events and moods, linked to psychiatric disorders and suicidality. This study provides a detailed description of ruminating from a lifeworld perspective, using micro-phenomenological interviews with 51 participants (107 interviews, 79 episodes). Ruminating is an epistemic practice driven by a need to resolve uncertainty after a collapse of commonsense understanding, leading to intellectualization and detachment from embodied responses. It involves paralysis, emptiness, and problematic relationships with knowledge. Rather than a maladaptive thought pattern, ruminating constitutes a complex lifeworld, suggesting a reconceptualization from a unified symptom to a system of interrelated altered experiences.