Understanding how beliefs form and change is important because people act upon their beliefs in the world around them, which has implications for everyone. The present research programme therefore aimed to explore mechanisms in the belief process. This was approached from the dual-process perspective that there are two kinds of thinking: intuitive and rational. It was predicted that belief...
For millennia, anecdotal reports have described how creative insights have been experienced during the transition from wake to sleep (hypnagogia). In the 1970’s, it was reported that the fleeting moments in which hypnagogia and creativity interact are accompanied by characteristic neuroelectric activity, which is disclosed by a specific feature of the Electroencephalogram (EEG): the increase of...
The thesis is based upon fieldwork conducted in London (between 1997 - 2001) amongst the practitioners of "Chaos magick" -a form of magical practice which appeared in United Kingdom during the late 1970's as part of the wider neo-pagan and magical subculture. Chaos magicians utilise trance states as means of attaining an unmediated experience of the inchoate and indeterministic ground of being...