Comparing psychedelic and meditation experience reports with natural language processing.
Konsta Kallio-Mannila, Rosa Salmela, Jussi Jylkkä
Sci Rep December 16, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-27724-0 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Explorative study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 197 |
| Population | Adults who had a personally meaningful experience facilitated by psychedelics or meditation |
| Topics | Meditation |
| Citations | 2 |
| Key points | Psychedelic and meditation experience reports were highly similar in semantic and lexical content, but psychedelic reports showed higher emotional intensity (both positive and negative sentiments) compared to more neutral meditation reports. |
Abstract
Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used natural language processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.