Ketamine produces immediate antidepressant effects and has inspired research into next-generation treatments. Ketamine also has short term dissociative effects, in which individuals report altered consciousness and perceptions of themselves and their environment. However, whether ketamine's dissociative side effects are necessary for its antidepressant effects remains unclear. This perspective...
Classic psychedelics produce altered states of consciousness that individuals often interpret as meaningful experiences. Across a number of human studies, when the participant-rated intensity of the overall drug effects are statistically controlled for, certain subjective effects predict therapeutic and other desirable outcomes. Underlying neurobiological mechanisms are likely necessary but not...
Sexual intercourse alters normal waking consciousness. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) refer to marked deviations from usual waking consciousness, and include alterations in the sense of self, attention, thought processes, time awareness and sensory perception. Sex can induce ASC, as indicated by states of attentional absorption in bodily sensations concomitant with loss of time...
Charisma is an unstable basis upon which to build authority. Charismatic leaders need their followers to perceive them as being endowed with extraordinary, even supernatural, gifts. Detractors can in turn question whether the leader actually possesses these unique qualities. Using Judith von Halle and her conflicts with the Anthroposophical Society as a case study, we address the question of...
The majority of research that has been conducted around counselling and psychotherapy has been directed towards the evaluation of client outcome and client experience. Studies concentrated solely on therapist experience during the therapeutic encounter are largely in the minority. The purpose of this study was to explicate a deeper understanding of the unusual and unforgettable events that led...
The past decade has seen a renaissance of research interest into the psychotherapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds. In 2019, Oakland and Denver became the first two jurisdictions in the United States to decriminalize the possession of psychedelic-containing organisms. As research and public policy continue to evolve, it becomes increasingly plausible that psychedelics will become viable...
This article is based on a five-year qualitative ethnographic study of bondage and discipline/dominance and submission/sadism and masochism (BDSM) in Sweden. In-depth interviews were completed with 29 self-defined BDSM practitioners. In the article, I investigate spirituality in two different contexts, namely within BDSM practice and in the charismatic Christianity. With a focus on power...
Propofol is a short-acting medication that results in decreased levels of consciousness and is used for general anesthesia. Although it is the most commonly used anesthetic in the world, much remains unknown about the mechanisms by which it induces a loss of consciousness. Characterizing anesthesia-induced alterations to brain network activity might provide a powerful framework for...
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of us experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness constitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity relate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem of explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from the interplay...
Transpersonal psychotherapy is based on transpersonal psychology and considers that the psyche is multidimensional and that there are several “levels of consciousness” and each has different characteristics and is governed by different laws. Transpersonal psychology is the study of human nature and proceeds on the assumption that human beings possess potentials that exceed the limits of their...
Psychedelic drugs and virtual reality (VR) each have the capacity to disrupt the rigidity and limitations of typical conscious experience. This article delineates the parallels among psychedelic and VR states as well as their potential synergistic applications in clinical and recreational settings. Findings indicate that, individually, psychedelics and VR are used in analogous ways to alter...
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of\nus experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness\nconstitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity\nrelate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem\nof explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from...
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of us experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness constitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity relate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem of explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from the interplay...
Ayahuasca is described as a hallucinogenic substance whose property is to alter the subjective experience of time and impair the perception of the passage of time during stimuli of more than two to three seconds. The dose-dependent effects of two concentrations of ayahuasca in the ritualistic context were investigated employing temporal reproduction tasks in participants experienced in...
Time Expansion Experiences (TEEs) occur when a person’s normal experience of time slows down or expands significantly. Previous research has associated them mainly with accidents but also with altered states of consciousness such as mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences, and near-death experiences. This article describes a qualitative study of 74 reports of “Time Expansion Experiences”...
An understanding of the roles of altered states of consciousness in disrupting entrenched and dysfunctional ways of thinking may give us hope for a correction to many of humanity's seemingly intractable problems. This article considers altered states induced via substances known as psychedelics at various levels of abstraction through the lenses of history, biology and botany, neurophysiology,...
Research has found that the vividness of conscious experience is related to brain dynamics. Despite both being anesthetics, propofol and ketamine produce different subjective states: we explore the different effects of these two anaesthetics on the structure of dynamic attractors reconstructed from electrophysiological activity recorded from cerebral cortex of two macaques. We used two methods:...
Patterns of functional interactions across distributed brain regions are suggested to provide a scaffold for the conscious processing of information, with marked topological alterations observed in loss of consciousness. However, establishing a firm link between macro-scale brain network organisation and conscious cognition requires direct investigations into neuropsychologically-relevant...
Dynamically assessing the level of consciousness is still challenging during anesthesia. With the help of Electroencephalography (EEG), the human brain electric activity can be noninvasively measured at high temporal resolution. Several typical quasi-stable states are introduced to represent the oscillation of the global scalp electric field. These so-called microstates reflect spatiotemporal...
Abstract Increasing evidence suggests that altered states of consciousness (ASC) are associated with both positive and negative effects on components of creative performance, and convergent and divergent thinking in particular. We provide a metacontrol framework that allows characterizing factors that induce ASC in terms of their general impact on the information processing style of problem...