Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1987
S Jakes, D R Hemsley
The present report is of the relationships between personality measures, hallucinatory experiences, and hypnogogic/hypnopompic imagery in the normal population. 'Psychoticism' was significantly related to reports of hallucinatory experiences, and a measure of hallucinatory predisposition was significantly associated with strong hypnogogic/hypnopompic imagery.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1986
Ronald J Pekala, Jack Steinberg, V. K. Kumar
The results of two studies suggest that the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory has adequate reliability and validity in assessing alterations in phenomenological experience associated with stimulus conditions, such as eyes open and closed, sitting quietly, and an hypnotic induction.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1986
Michael C. Dillbeck, Panayotis D. Assimakis, Dennis Raimondi et al.
50 college students practicing the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program were administered the Culture Fair Intelligence Test and Group Embedded Figures Test. Significant longitudinal increases over a 3- to 5-yr. period were found in performance on both measures. In the context of normative data, these findings indicate that the practices contribute to an increase in the effectiveness...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1986
C J Wood
This study investigated the effects of meditation/relaxation on physiological responses during the performance of a fine motor and a gross motor task. A pretest-posttest control group, randomized-blocks design was used to study a group of 16 meditators and a group of 16 nonmeditators, subgroups of each who relaxed prior to performing on a pursuit-rotor tracking device as a fine motor task and...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1985
Harry T. Hunt
Various apparent drawbacks and extensions are considered of a previously developed cognitive approach to mystical and altered-state experience as directly exteriorizing the normally masked processes of semantics or “felt meaning.” The humanly criterial “turning around on the schemata” as the basis for recombinatory symbolic operations would be based on the cross-modal or synaesthetic embodiment...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1985
W. Richard Cowling
The purpose of the investigation was to examine the relationship of three variables proposed as correlates of development in a conceptual system. Variables were selected and measured based on congruency with the system and on the theoretical rationale that the diverse perceptual features of mystical experience and differentiation would be conducive to emergent creativity. A volunteer sample of...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1985
Raymond F. Martinetti
222 students completed the Cognitive Processes Survey which assessed imaginal life, orientation toward imaginal life, and defensiveness. Subjects were separated according to number of weekly dreams recalled and tested for short-term memory with the Digit Span of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Analyses of variance showed that imaginal life differed significantly across low, average, and...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1985
H T Hunt
Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are considered and rejected. Contrary to current orthodoxy subjective experience during abstract cognitive activity, especially when placed in its natural series with phenomenal accounts of so-called "altered states of consciousness," can provide unique and crucial evidence concerning just that core of...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1984
Piercarla Cicogna, Daniela Battaglia, Corrado Cavallero
Two reports of the same REM dream, which were collected 5 hr. apart in waking condition, were compared to two film reports, collected under the same conditions. Differences in the addition of content elements and associative sentences between first and second reports of the dream and film materials were analyzed. Keeping the physiological condition constant during the interval between the two...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, Michael Dysart
89 citations
Tachistoscopic presentation of light flashes was used to test for differences in visual sensitivity among 3 groups of practitioners of Buddhist mindfulness meditation and non-meditator-controls. Meditation practitioners were able to detect light flashes of shorter duration than the non-meditators. There were no differences among the meditator groups. There were no differences among the groups...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, Michael Dysart
82 citations
Practitioners of the mindfulness form of Buddhist meditation were tested for visual sensitivity before and immediately after a 3-mo. retreat during which they practiced mindfulness meditation for 16 hr. each day. A control group composed of the staff at the retreat center was similarly tested. Visual sensitivity was defined in two ways: by a detection threshold based on the duration of simple...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Michael A. Persinger
53 citations
Religious and god-related experiences have been hypothesized to be a portion of the continuum of phenomena that are generated by endogenous, transient electrical stimulation within deep structures of the temporal lobe. According to this hypothesis, normal people, without psychiatric history, who report intense religious experiences should also demonstrate a wide range of temporal lobe-related...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Zack Zdenek Cernovsky
Scores of 46 part-time college students (mean age 25.8 yr., SD = 5.7, 21 women, 24 men) on a 16-item inventory measure of attitudes toward dreams were only weakly related to the students' own estimates of their dream recall frequency in the last 6 mo. ( r = .31), and unrelated to a similar estimate of nightmare recall frequency.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1984
Harry T. Hunt
Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with “schizophrenia,” “regression,” and “primitivity” and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonal-humanistic assertions of a “higher” path of development (“self-actualization”). By considering the full...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1984
Michael A. Persinger
Transient, focal, epileptic-like electrical changes in the temporal lobe, without convulsions, have been hypothesized to be primary correlates of religious experiences. Given these properties, direct measurement of these phenomena within the laboratory should be rare. However, two illustrated instances have been recorded. The first case involved the occurrence of a delta-wave-dominant...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1983
Michael A. Persinger
298 citations
Mystical and religious experiences are hypothesized to be evoked by transient, electrical microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe. Although experiential details are affected by context and reinforcement history, basic themes reflect the inclusion of different amygdaloid-hippocampal structures and adjacent cortices. Whereas the unusual electrical coherence allows access to...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1983
Paul Tholey
73 citations
In research conducted over several years and with over 200 subjects we have developed various techniques for inducing and manipulating lucid dreams. Lucidity can be achieved in the following ways: by practice in developing a critical-reflective frame of mind concerning one's state of consciousness, by intention and autosuggestion, and by methods involving apparatus. It is also possible to...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1983
Paul Tholey
This experiment illustrates that systematic observations in lucid dreams can be used to test hypotheses concerning the relation between dream content and eye movements. The observations were carried out by 5 students who had learned to induce lucid dreams by using the reflection technique developed by the author. Several hypotheses concerning the relation in question could be rejected.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1982
Robert D. Ogilvie, Harry T. Hunt, Paul D. Tyson et al.
61 citations
10 good dream recallers spent 2 nights in the sleep lab during which they were awakened 4 times per night from REM sleep, twice during their highest alpha activity in REM, and twice during low REM alpha. 5 were given alpha feedback training prior to sleep onset. Arousals from high alpha REM sleep yielded significantly higher lucidity ratings. Alpha feedback had no effect upon lucidity or REM...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1982
Piercarla Cicogna, Corrado Cavallero, Marino Bosinelli
10 citations
Reports of 56 dreams from 5 subjects, given upon awakening during the second REMP, were analyzed and compared with a further 3 reports of each dream, obtained the following morning, 3 days, and 1 wk. later, using a system of Coding Units (CUs) and the Scoring System for Latent Structure of Foulkes. There were no significant differences between the second, third, and fourth reports, while the...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1982
H T Hunt
A classification-rating system for formal anomalies in dream experience focuses on the contribution a cognitive psychology of dream bizarreness might make to the question of whether dreaming is a form of thinking. In Part I, two traditional issues in the psychology of dreams--dreaming as "hallucination" and dreaming as symbolic thought--are connected via phenomenological method and cognitive...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1982
Keith M. T. Hearne
A group of 70 persons (16 males, 54 females) who experience lucid dreams (those in which the dreamer becomes aware of dreaming) were given set tasks to perform in the lucid state and asked to report what happened. A pilot study had indicated certain consistencies of effect between subjects. Evidence was obtained, based on the reports of 16 persons, to suggest that it is often difficult to...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1981
Paul Swartz, Lise Seginer
A group of 60 university students, 30 men and 30 women, completed Hood's Mysticism Scale, Research Form D (M Scale) and performed a motor skills task following body rotation. Subjects with the strongest tendency to mystical experience exhibited least destability, although only for the women was the association statistically significant. Women as a group scored higher on the M Scale and...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1981
Stephen P. La Berge, Lynn E. Nagel, William C. Dement et al.
237 citations
SUMMARY: The occurrence of lucid dreaming (dreaming while being conscious that one is dreaming) has been verified for 5 selected subjects who signaled that they knew they were dreaming while continuing to dream during unequivocal REM sleep. The signals consisted of particular dream actions having observable concomitants and were performed in accordance with pre-sleep agreement. The ability of...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1980
Stephen P. La Berge
122 citations
The author was the subject in an investigation of the feasibility of learning to dream lucidly, i.e., while knowing that one is dreaming. During the 3-yr. study, the subject recorded a total of 389 lucid dreams and developed a mnemonic technique for the voluntary induction of lucid dreams (MILD). Without using any induction procedure, the subject reported less than 1 lucid dream per month....