Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1983
Michael A. Persinger
298 citations
Mystical and religious experiences may arise from brief, electrical microseizures in deep temporal lobe structures, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus. The specific brain regions involved shape the content of these experiences, such as out-of-body sensations, distortions of time and space, intense meaningfulness, and dreamlike scenes. While cultural context and personal history influence details, shared temporal lobe properties across humans produce cross-cultural similarities. These experiences exist on a continuum from mild daily highs to intense, recurring religious conversions. Predisposing factors include genetic or biochemical conditions that increase temporal lobe instability. Life crises and near-death situations are common triggers. Because these microseizures activate brain reward regions and reduce death anxiety, they can become learned responses to existential trauma, powerfully shaping human behavior.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1981
Stephen P. La Berge, Lynn E. Nagel, William C. Dement et al.
237 citations
Lucid dreaming—dreaming while aware that one is dreaming—was verified in five selected subjects who signaled that they knew they were dreaming while continuing to dream during unambiguous REM sleep. The signals were specific dream actions with observable physical counterparts, performed according to pre-sleep agreement. This signaling ability allows proficient lucid dreamers to conduct dream experiments, marking the exact timing of dream events to enable precise psychophysiological correlations and systematic hypothesis testing.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1980
Stephen P. La Berge
122 citations
Over three years, a single subject (the author) learned to have lucid dreams—dreams in which the dreamer knows they are dreaming. Without any technique, fewer than one lucid dream occurred per month. Auto-suggestion produced 1 to 13 lucid dreams per month (average 5.4), with at most two per night. A mnemonic technique called MILD yielded 18 to 26 lucid dreams per month (average 21.5), with up to four per night, demonstrating that lucid dreaming can be deliberately induced.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1994
Nisha Rani, P. V. Krishna Rao
88 citations
People who practice hatha yoga have a greater awareness of normal, nonemotive bodily processes than those who do not. A group of 17 yoga practitioners scored higher on the Body Awareness Questionnaire than a control group of 19 non-practitioners, indicating that yoga training is associated with enhanced body awareness.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1993
M. A. Persinger
86 citations
Multiple variants of the sensed presence often precede mystical and religious experiences, which are frequently followed by sudden, permanent changes in self-concept. The model of vectorial hemisphericity proposes that the relative metabolic activity of synaptic patterns between the cerebral hemispheres during transient interhemispheric intercalation determines the affect, content, and type of experience. Depending on the relative activity of the two hemispheres, intrusions of the right hemispheric equivalent of the left hemispheric sense of self generate experimental phenomena including "evil entities," gods, out-of-body experiences, and alterations in space-time. Conditions that facilitate interhemispheric intercalation and the generation of these experiences are discussed.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, Michael Dysart
82 citations
After a three-month retreat with 16 hours of daily mindfulness meditation, practitioners showed improved visual sensitivity: they could detect briefer light flashes and distinguish shorter intervals between successive flashes. A control group of retreat staff showed no change. Phenomenological reports suggest mindfulness practice brings normally preattentive visual processes into conscious awareness. These results support Buddhist textual claims about perceptual changes during mindfulness meditation.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 2011
Michael Schredl, Daniel Erlacher
81 citations
About half (51%) of a representative sample of 919 German adults reported having had at least one lucid dream—a dream in which the person knows they are dreaming. Women recalled lucid dreams significantly more often than men, and lucid dream recall decreased with age. These differences may be explained by overall dream recall frequency, which correlated moderately (r = .57) with lucid dream frequency. Education, marital status, and income showed no relationship with how often people had lucid dreams. The high prevalence suggests that laboratory research on lucid dreams could further understanding of sleep, dreaming, and consciousness.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1974
Larry A. Hjelle
81 citations
Experienced transcendental meditators report lower anxiety, a greater sense of internal control, and higher self-actualization on 7 of 12 subscales compared with novice meditators. The findings suggest that long-term meditation practice is associated with improved psychological health and may have therapeutic value.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1974
Kenneth R. Pelletier
79 citations
After three months of Transcendental Meditation instruction, volunteers showed increased ego distance and field independence on the autokinetic test, embedded-figures test, and rod-and-frame test. The findings clarify issues in research on perceptual style and meditation.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1983
Paul Tholey
73 citations
Over several years and with over 200 subjects, techniques have been developed for inducing and manipulating lucid dreams. Lucidity can be achieved by practicing a critical-reflective frame of mind, intention and autosuggestion, or using apparatus. Methods to retain lucidity while falling asleep involve concentrating on visual phenomena, the body, or the thinking ego. Intentional acts help induce lucid dreams and manipulate their content. Dreamers can influence dream events within limits, and their desires, emotional state, looks, verbal utterances, and actions are important. Other dream figures can also aid in manipulation.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1982
Robert D. Ogilvie, Harry T. Hunt, Paul D. Tyson et al.
61 citations
Among 10 good dream recallers, awakenings from REM sleep periods with high alpha brain activity produced significantly higher ratings of lucidity compared to low-alpha REM periods. Alpha feedback training before sleep did not affect lucidity or alpha levels during REM. The authors discuss parallels between lucid dreaming and meditative states.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
M A Persinger
53 citations
People who report intense religious experiences also show a range of behaviors linked to the temporal lobe, consistent with the hypothesis that such experiences arise from endogenous electrical stimulation in that brain region. Across two studies of first-year university students, those who reported religious experiences scored higher on questionnaire clusters containing temporal-lobe symptoms, regardless of church attendance in one study. They were also more likely to keep a diary and enjoy poetry. However, they did not score higher on clusters of mundane psychological or proprioceptive statements, odd sensations, or a modified MMPI Lie scale, indicating the effect is specific to temporal-lobe-related phenomena.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1976
Kristian Holt‐hansen
51 citations
When nine participants simultaneously tasted beer and listened to a rhythmic sound whose pitch could be varied, certain frequencies produced a reported harmony between taste and sound. At these harmonious pitches, participants described characteristic experiences, including an optimum taste of the beer, rhythmic sensations in the head, and tickling sensations in the jaws and mouth. Three participants also reported experiences resembling those described by people under the influence of drugs such as mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and cannabis.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1993
M A Persinger
40 citations
University students who meditated, primarily using Transcendental Meditation, reported more frequent experiences resembling complex partial epilepsy—such as vibrations, hearing their name called, paranormal phenomena, profound reactions to poetry or prose, and religious experiences—compared to non-meditators. Among meditators, longer practice correlated with more of these signs and a sensed presence, but not with control, olfactory, or perseverative experiences. These findings support the idea that practices promoting cognitive kindling can increase complex partial epileptic-like signs.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1975
Joel Younger, Wayne Adriance, Ralph J. Berger
37 citations
During Transcendental Meditation, most experienced practitioners showed clear signs of physiological sleep in their EEG and EOG recordings, with 6 out of 8 subjects spending considerable portions of their meditation periods asleep.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2021
Jennifer Meggs, Mark Chen
15 citations
A brief mindfulness intervention improved how accurately sedentary young adults perceived their exertion during exercise. In a sample of 42 inactive individuals, participants completed a cycling task first without training and then after 15 minutes of mindfulness audio instruction. After the mindfulness session, self-reported ratings of exertion more closely matched actual physiological measures, indicating increased bodily awareness. Participants also reported greater absorption in the activity, suggesting less distraction. Mindfulness may help sedentary young adults better appreciate and re-engage with exercise.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1979
John Michael Williams
2 citations
LSD produces visual distortions and analgesia. Visual effects likely stem from reduced light-evoked input to the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus from retinal pathways, especially affecting slower or complex-receptive-field afferents. LSD's analgesic effect, accompanied by severe psychotic symptoms, appears to result from actions on a centrifugally controlled pain system involving midbrain raphe neurons.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2026
Robert A. King
People who have experienced an out-of-body experience (OBE) in which they saw their physical body from an outside location score higher on a measure of threat sensitivity than those who have not. The study compared 105 individuals who reported such an autoscopic OBE with 150 who had not, using the Threat Sensitivity Scale. The higher average threat sensitivity among those with an OBE remained even when accounting for whether participants had faced a life-threatening situation. The findings suggest that autoscopic OBEs are associated with greater threat sensitivity.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2018
Denholm J Adventure-Heart, Natasha A Madden, Paul Delfabbro
Taking 240 mg of vitamin B6 before bed for five consecutive nights significantly increased how much dream content people remembered, but did not affect dream vividness, bizarreness, or color, nor did it change other sleep measures. A B complex vitamin preparation, by contrast, led to lower self-rated sleep quality and greater tiredness upon waking. The findings replicate and extend a smaller earlier study, suggesting vitamin B6 may be useful in lucid dreaming research.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 2010
Svend Davanger, Øyvind Ellingsen, Are Holen et al.
Meditation that emphasizes a relaxed focus of attention, where thoughts and sensations arise freely, activates specific frontal brain areas distinct from concentrative control tasks. Using fMRI in experienced Acem meditation practitioners, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (BA47) showed significantly greater activation during repetition of a meditation sound compared to concentrative meditation-like tasks. This meditation-specific brain activation did not habituate over time but increased with continuous meditation bouts. The findings suggest that relaxed-focus meditation engages distinct prefrontal cortex regions, offering insight into the neurobiological correlates of such practices.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2009
Michael Schredl
Age, sex, social class, and size of place of residence each have small but significant effects on how often people recall positively toned and neutral dreams. Women and residents of large cities report dreams more often than men and residents of small towns. Dream-recall frequency declines across age groups. For negatively toned dreams, which are recalled less often overall, these sociodemographic effects are less pronounced.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2008
Michael Schredl
In a representative sample of 931 people over 14, age, sex, and size of place of residence each had small but significant effects on how often people recall their dreams. Women and residents of large cities tend to report dreams more often than men and residents of small towns. Dream-recall frequency declines with age. Together these sociodemographic variables account for only a small portion of the variation in dream recall.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 2008
Michael Schredl, Iris Reinhard
Longer sleep is expected to increase dream recall because it provides more REM sleep, yet earlier studies on habitual sleep duration and dream recall have shown mixed results, while experimentally changing sleep duration does have a clear effect. Analyzing 444 participants' diaries over 14 days, the authors found that both within-person day-to-day changes and between-person differences in sleep duration influence how often people remember their dreams.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 2007
Michael Schredl
Dream recall frequency does not differ significantly across socioeconomic status in a sample of 612 Chinese students from elite, intermediate, and rural schools. Earlier studies had suggested higher socioeconomic status was linked to more frequent dream recall, but this analysis found no such association. The authors suggest future research could explore whether "dream socialization"—such as encouraging children to remember dreams—varies by socioeconomic background and is influenced by culture.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 2006
Michael Schredl, Heiko Sartorius
A small positive correlation of .19 between the frequency of dream recall reported by mothers and their children suggests a possible socialization effect on dream recall frequency, consistent with a 1973 hypothesis by Cohen. The study involved 88 mothers (average age 38.7 years) and their children (45 girls, 43 boys; average age 9.9 years).