This paper reviews the limited empirical research supporting BDSM as a spiritual ritual that enables distinct altered states of consciousness. It expands upon Sagarin, Lee, and Klement’s (2015) preliminary comparison of BDSM to extreme ritual by suggesting that BDSM bears in common with spiritual ritual elements of pain or ordeal, spiritual meaning, and transformative potential. An increasing...
A model is proposed for relating production of spontaneous cognitive events such as daydreams to the organism's continuous response to external stimuli. Employing a simple signal-detection task under conditions of partial sensory deprivation, a series of experiments were carried out to test specific predictions from the model. In one experiment increasing speed of signal presentation or demands...