Medical Hypotheses
December 1, 2014
Baland Jalal, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a common condition occurring either at sleep onset or sleep offset. During SP the sleeper experiences gross motor paralysis while the sensory system is clear. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are common during SP and may involve seeing, hearing, and sensing the presence of menacing intruders in one's bedroom. This "intruder" is often perceived as a shadowy...
Medical Hypotheses
March 1, 2014
Mauro W. Zappaterra, Lysander Jim, Sanjog Pangarkar
Chronic pain is often managed using a multidisciplinary, biopsychosocial approach. Interventions targeting the biological, psychological, and social aspects of both the patient and the pain have been demonstrated to provide objective and subjective improvement in chronic pain symptoms. The mechanism by which pain attenuation occurs after these interventions remains to be elucidated. While there...
Medical Hypotheses
December 1, 2013
James M Robertson
The expression of consciousness and the site of memory storage within the brain are unknown despite over a century of intense empirical scrutiny. Recent anatomical studies show that human protoplasmic astrocytes form innumerable uniform polyhedral tessellating domains that are arranged three-dimensionally. This complex geometric structure provides a matrix for seamless and three-dimensional...
Medical Hypotheses
November 1, 2013
E Maciejczyk, P Kafarski
4 citations
Hypothesis have been made that relatively high level of mannitol present in the tissues of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) enables more efficient transportation of these active substances into the brain and thus enhance their total activity. It may have been supported by the fact that hallucinogenic effect after A. muscaria consumption is greater than after ingestion of an active substance...
Medical Hypotheses
September 1, 2013
Y Auxéméry
An near death experience (NDE) is the experience of an atypical state of consciousness that is induced by the neuropsychological consequences of a passage near death. Far from being a psychologically traumatic event, these experiences never cause flashbacks and can even eliminate the fear of death. Listening to patients who have shared their near death sensations has encouraged the reevaluation...
Medical Hypotheses
July 6, 2013
Sérgio Mota-Rolim, John Fontenele Araújo
50 citations
Several lines of evidence converge to the idea that rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) is a good model to foster our understanding of psychosis. Both REMS and psychosis course with internally generated perceptions and lack of rational judgment, which is attributed to a hyperlimbic activity along with hypofrontality. Interestingly, some individuals can become aware of dreaming during REMS, a...
Medical Hypotheses
July 1, 2013
Maurizio Coppola, Raffaella Mondola
Methoxydine is a dissociative anaesthetic belonging to the arylcyclohexylamine class. This substance shows pharmacodynamic similarities with ketamine, a medication with demonstrated rapid-acting antidepressant effects. Like ketamine, results of binding assays have shown that methoxydine is an uncompetitive antagonist of NMDA receptor approximately as potent as ketamine, but less potent than...
Medical Hypotheses
October 1, 2012
Maurizio Coppola, Raffaella Mondola
Methoxetamine is a dissociative anaesthetic showing pharmacodynamic similarities with its analogue ketamine, a medication with demonstrated rapid-acting antidepressant effects. Like ketamine and other arylcyclohexylamine compounds, methoxetamine is thought to be both a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist and a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. Furthermore, it acts as an agonist at dopamine D2,...
Medical Hypotheses
May 1, 2010
Brian Milne
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is used widely in the treatment of psychiatric conditions; however, its use is not without controversy with some recommending a moratorium on its clinical use. Complications and side effects of ECT include memory loss, injury, problems originating from sympathetic stimulation such as arrhythmias and myocardial ischemia and the risk of general anesthesia. Nitrous...
Medical Hypotheses
December 1, 2008
Bruce G Charlton
12 citations
The most frequently discussed role for genetic engineering is in relation to medicine, and a second area which provokes discussion is the use of genetic engineering as an enhancement technology. But one neglected area is the potential use of genetic engineering to increase human spiritual and religious experience - or genospirituality. If technologies are devised which can conveniently and...
Medical Hypotheses
2007
Bruce G Charlton
15 citations
Alienation is the feeling that life is 'meaningless', that we do not belong in the world. But alienation is not an inevitable part of the human condition: some people do feel at one with the world as a consequence of the animistic way of thinking which is shared by children and hunter-gatherers. Animism considers all significant entities to have 'minds', to be 'alive', to be sentient agents....
Medical Hypotheses
2007
Bruce G Charlton
Once I had a bizarre dream in which I was vouchsafed a secret which would ensure my wealth and success. It was the title for a comic novel; one supposedly so funny that it would guarantee classic status for any book: Oh Colonel Flastratus! The distinctive feature about my dream was its quality of profound significance, which felt akin to the Eureka moment of a scientific discovery. This led me...
Medical Hypotheses
2006
U Maas, S Strubelt
41 citations
Ibogaine is the most important alkaloid of the Central African Iboga-shrub. It is the central drug in Gabonian initiation ceremonies in which it is used to cause a near-death experience. In Western countries it is used in private clinics to treat addiction. However, in the United States and most European countries it is classified as an illegal drug because at least eight persons have died...
Medical Hypotheses
2006
David W. Orme-Johnson
Although meditation has been practiced worldwide for centuries, there are no reports that it causes epilepsy or increases the predisposition to it. Medical care utilization statistics and clinical studies indicate that individuals who regularly practice the Transcendental Meditation technique have fewer problems of the nervous system and specifically show decreased symptoms of epilepsy. The...
Medical Hypotheses
2005
Shahar Arzy, Moshé Idel, Théodor Landis et al.
The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary...
Medical Hypotheses
2004
J. Fell, C. Elger, M. Kurthen
Neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) have been defined as neural systems and states of those systems, which are correlated with certain states of consciousness and which are minimally sufficient for these states of consciousness to occur. Here, it is discussed whether based on the identification of a NCC one may claim that this neural correlate causes the corresponding state of...
Medical Hypotheses
2004
Yair Neuman
In this paper, I present a case-study that initiates a discussion about the meaning of pain. The case-study concerns a person who was under deep sedation during colonoscopy. The person did not experience pain from a first-person perspective, although pain was evident to the medical team from a second-person perspective. The divergence of pain perspectives raises an interesting quandary. If the...
Medical Hypotheses
2003
M ben-Aaron
Electroencephalograms recorded from sleeping subjects are reinterpreted, from first principles, to explain the relationship between the observed wave-forms and cerebral processes. The manifestations of narcolepsy, namely, sleep paralysis, hypnopompic hallucinations and cataplexy are consistent with a hypothesis that the disorder is the result of entrainment of cerebral waves, causing almost...
Medical Hypotheses
April 1, 2002
M Fritzsche
Schizophrenia, intoxication with tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta-THC), and cannabis psychosis induce characteristic time and space distortions suggesting a common psychotic dysfunction. Since genetic research into schizophrenia has led into disappointing dead ends, the present study is focusing on this phenotype. It is shown that information theory can account for the dynamical basis of higher...
Medical Hypotheses
1990
Karl Jansen
96 citations
The Near-Death Experience (NDE) is a dissociative mental state with characteristic features. These can be reproduced by ketamine which acts at sigma sites and blocks N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) linked phencyclidine (PCP) receptors to reduce ischaemic damage. Endogenous ligands, alpha and beta-endopsychosin, have been detected for these receptors which suggests an explanation for some NDE's: the...
Medical Hypotheses
1986
Thomas J. Riedlinger, June E. Riedlinger
5 citations
Virtually all mainstream schools of psychology, including biological psychology, reject the idea that people sustain psychological trauma at birth. Their objections are basically those raised by Freud more than 50 years ago: (1) lack of solid evidence that difficult births are related to mental disturbances and (2) a general conviction that the neonatal brain is not sufficiently developed to...