The use of antidepressants continues to increase, yet relatively little is known about their precise subjective effects, and there is growing concern about subtle psychological side effects. One novel investigative approach to these problems may be to use introspectively trained subjects such as meditators. Experienced meditators recently taking antidepressants rated antidepressant effects on...
The authors investigated the frequency and correlates of déjà vu experiences in 386 healthy adult volunteers recruited from several areas in Japan. Déjà vu experiences and related experiences were evaluated using the Inventory of Déjà vu Experiences Assessment. Déjà vu experiences were observed by 294 (76.2%) of the 386 participants. Persons who experienced déjà vu were younger and more...
Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Houran, James and Lange, Rense, Eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. , Inc, 2001. vi + 330 pp. $85.00 As numerous surveys and best-seller lists have shown, many people in our society believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, apparitions, or poltergeists. Many also claim to have experienced such phenomena, and...
This study tested the hypotheses that a) the dream content of crack cocaine abusers in Trinidad and Tobago changes during abstinence, and b) the change in dream content can be used to predict treatment outcome. The sample comprised 46 consecutive patients who completed a 3-month residential treatment program and were followed up after 6 months. Dreams and associated emotions were recorded...
Lippmann, Paul. Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2000. xii + 264 pp. $45.00. Writing like a poet, with the wisdom of a rabbi, in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, Lippmann argues against the current practice in psychoanalysis of ignoring dreams. Lamenting that the use of dreams in therapy has fallen out of favor to be replaced by over-preoccupation with...
1 Parapsychology Foundation, 228 East 71st Street, New York, New York. Send reprint requests to Dr. Alvarado. This work was supported at different stages by the Parapsychology Foundation, the Society for Psychical Research, and the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene.
This study measured distinctions made by a sample of clergy and mental health professionals in response to three categories of presenting problems with religious content: mental disorder, religious or spiritual problem, and "pure" religious problem. A national, random sample of rabbis (N = 111) and clinical psychologists (N = 90) provided evaluations of three vignettes: schizophrenia, mystical...
Confusional arousals, or sleep drunkenness, occur upon awakening and remain unstudied in the general population. We selected a representative sample from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy (N = 13,057) and conducted telephone interviews. Confusional arousals were reported by 2.9% of the sample: 1% (95% confidence interval: .8 to 1.2%) of the sample also presented with memory deficits...
Near-death experiences (NDEs) often produce profound changes in attitudes and behavior that can lead to psychosocial and psychospiritual problems. The diagnostic label of religious or spiritual problem, included in DSM-IV under the category of other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, was originally proposed to encompass NDEs and their aftereffects. Four cases are discussed in...
This study compared the frequency and types of dissociative experiences reported by detoxified alcoholics and drug abusers, and examined the relationship between dissociation and recent and lifetime use of alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, and heroin. One hundred thirty-eight self-referred male veterans detoxified from alcohol (N=62) and drugs (N=76) on inpatient units at a Veterans Affairs hospital...
A multinational, collaborative, biomedical investigation of the effects of hoasca (ayahuasca), a potent concoction of plant hallucinogens, was conducted in the Brazilian Amazon during the summer of 1993. This report describes the psychological assessment of 15 long-term members of a syncretic church that utilizes hoasca as a legal, psychoactive sacrament as well as 15 matched controls with no...
Clinical research with hallucinogens has resumed after a generation's hiatus. To place these new studies in context, this article reviews the history of hallucinogens' use and abuse, discusses their pharmacological properties, and highlights previous human studies. Research with lysergic acid diethylamide and related hallucinogens with thousands of patients and control subjects was associated...
Our current understanding of mental processes in health and disease is limited by the absence of a practical model describing the physiology of the mind as an informational system. The mind is described here as a physical system with four functional dimensions that can be interrelated mathematically on the basis of information theory. These variables describe the information processing...
Both patients with narcolepsy and insomnia frequently present clinically with nocturnal sleep disrupted by disturbing dreams. Polysomnographic correlates of these reports are unclear. In this study, 24 patients with psychophysiological insomnia and 16 patients with narcolepsy were compared on selected polysomnographic and self-reported typical dream characteristics. As a group, patients with...
Life review and tunnel sensation in near-death experiences appear to be culture-bound phenomena, confined largely to societies where historic religions are dominant. The clinical literature postulating biological theories for life review and tunnel sensations, therefore, may have been developed somewhat prematurely. The present review argues that social and historical explanations are more...
In theory, research, and practice, mental health professionals have tended to ignore or pathologize the religious and spiritual dimensions of life. This represents a type of cultural insensitivity toward individuals who have religious and spiritual experiences in both Western and non-Western cultures. After documenting the "religiosity gap" between clinicians and patients, the authors review...
Dream reports of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were analyzed to ascertain whether cognitive deficits associated with this nonfocal brain pathology influence dream structure or dream recall. Fifteen outpatients with idiopathic PD were sampled (diagnosed from 1 to 10 years and currently in stage II or III of Hoehn and Yarh's scale); all were without psychiatric symptoms or major medical...
3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) has been at the center of a debate over its potential benefits as an adjunct to psychotherapy versus its capability for neurotoxic effects and is currently classified as a Schedule 1 drug by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). However, as yet, there is very little methodological data on the subjective experience of the MDMA-induced state or its...
Sleep data were obtained on 12 well-adjusted and 11 less-adjusted Holocaust survivors and on 10 control subjects. Each was also awakened from rapid eye movement sleep for dream recall. The less-adjusted survivors had more prolonged sleep latency than the well-adjusted and the control groups and lower sleep efficiency than the control subjects. The well-adjusted group had a significantly lower...
Recent trends in neurophilosophy question the validity of conceptions as to the nature of mental states and of "folk psychology" (FP) in general. One school of thought, the "eliminative materialistics," see FP as a misdirected and scientifically redundant approach to the mind which should be discarded; the "functionalists," in contrast, consider FP categories, such as belief, to be essential....
To compare the subjective experience of different forms of altered states of consciousness, computerized content analysis was applied to 66 autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia, hallucinogenic drug states, or mystical ecstasy and to 28 autobiographical control accounts of important personal experiences. The patterns of lexical choice used by the four groups were significantly different in...
Relationships between the out-of-body experience and personality adjustment were studied. A total of 445 college students, including 65 reporting out-of-body experiences, completed self-report measures of death orientation, defensive style, narcissism, paranormal beliefs, self-concept, and social desirability. No significant differences were found between respondents reporting out-of-body...