The intensity of the psychedelic experience has been shown to be associated with its clinical efficacy. This study aims to investigate the factors that may influence the level of altered consciousness during naturalistic psychedelic use, which serves as a proxy for the intensity of the psychedelic experience. A retrospective online survey was conducted on individuals who reported a psychedelic...
Personally meaningful music can evoke vivid emotions and autobiographical memories, reconnecting listeners with their personal past. Whether the autobiographical salience of music, as distinct from familiarity, modulates its effects on an individual’s state of consciousness has not been systematically tested. We compared autobiographically salient (AS) music with a standardized therapeutic...
Practices involving altered states of consciousness (ASCs) are receiving increasing scientific and public attention, particularly in domains such as psychedelic assisted therapy and mindfulness-based interventions (Lee et al., 2021; Nichols et al., 2017). There is also an increasing interest in a broader range of practices involving altered states, including breathwork, ice-bath immersions,...
Non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness that promote mental health and wellbeing are a growing focus of clinical and basic research. Previous work has revealed the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation. The current study investigated how a guided loving kindness meditation (LKM) combined with...
Altered states of consciousness range from psychotic disintegration to mystical union, with oceanic affectivity - experiences of ego dissolution, boundlessness, and affective merging - constituting a central feature. While such states can be induced by psychedelics, they also occur through trauma, meditative practices, or within compulsive addictive cycles. In addition, oceanic states may offer...
This article proposes a dual-self states framework in which reflective and experiential modes of consciousness are understood as dynamic configurations along a processing continuum. The reflective/experiential self-state corresponds to narrative, denotational, and self-referential consciousness underpinned by default mode network activity. The experiential self state is characterized as an...
Psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is renowned for inducing highly immersive experiences, often including encounters with seemingly sentient presences. While such phenomena are well documented, immersion under psychedelics remains conceptually underdefined and phenomenologically underexplored. Here we apply micro-phenomenology to characterize immersion under DMT as a structured...
Pain Within Altered States of Consciousness challenges conventional assumptions about pain. Rather than treating pain as a simple product of tissue damage, this book presents it as a dynamic construction of conscious experience—shaped by brain networks, attention, emotion, expectation, and the organization of the self. Bringing together anesthesiology, neuroscience, pain medicine, contemplative...
The Five Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness (5D-ASC) Rating Scale is a self-report measure used to characterize changes in consciousness induced by pharmacological (e.g., psychedelics) and non-pharmacological methods (e.g., meditation), and predict clinical outcomes. Although it has been widely used with English-speaking participants, there is no version that has been adapted for...
As direct-to-consumer ketamine prescriptions obtained via telehealth in the United States, along with psychedelic support, proliferate, some patients are turning to general-purpose chatbots as de facto "therapists" in unmonitored settings. These AI-guided altered-state sessions carry significant ethical, clinical, and legal risks. Current AI tools are not licensed professionals, lack consistent...
The intersection of Virtual Reality (VR) and Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs) represents a notable research domain in experimental and clinical contexts, highlighting the growing interest in how immersive technologies can induce, modulate, and assess non-ordinary cognitive and emotional states. This study examines literature from 2014 to 2024, providing a review of the methodological...