Arts & HealthMay 4, 2019S. Riches, Rich Maskey, Patrick Dishman et al.
Background The arts can increase public awareness of mental health. Stigma about psychosis remains high despite common occurrences of psychotic experiences in the general population (e.g. hearing voices, seeing visions, and other unusual sensory experiences). Targeted approaches may therefore benefit stigma reduction. This project aimed to produce an immersive art installation that increased...
The significance of altered consciousness in cinema hinges on the medium’s unprecedented ability to turn the visual consciousness of an Other inside-out onscreen, making it visible and inhabitable to the spectator. Cinema thus transcends the limits of intersubjectivity through a ‘double occupancy of vision’, which it may predicate to the consciousness of any fictional character. Cinematic...
Psychedelics exert unique effects on human consciousness. The thalamic filter model suggests that core effects of psychedelics may result from gating deficits, based on a disintegration of information processing within cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) feedback loops. To test this hypothesis, we characterized changes in directed (effective) connectivity between selected CTSC regions after...
Abstract What are the global neuronal signatures of altered states of consciousness (ASC)? Recently, increases in neural signal diversity, compared to those found in wakeful rest, have been reported during psychedelic states. Neural signal diversity has previously been identified as a robust signature of the state of consciousness, showing lower scores during sleep or anaesthesia compared to...
The article studies the complex and rather equivocal discourse set around the altered states of consciousness and so-called “emerging scientific paradigm” which claims to return to human existence a certain supreme transcendental meaning that could help rebuilding a universal symbolic space, and thus return a man himself to the sacred reality. The psychedelic trend unites concepts and...
A. Irving Hallowell contributed to virtually all areas of psychological anthropology as it exists today. His range was immense: from mental health to perception and cognition, from projective techniques to behavioral evolution, from the concept of the self to acculturation. A striking feature of Hallowell’s work is that, notwithstanding the breadth of his interests in the area of overlap...
Background: Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) has agonist activity at various serotonin (5-HT) and dopamine receptors. Despite the therapeutic and scientific interest in LSD, specific receptor contributions to its neurobiological effects remain unknown. Methods: We therefore conducted a double-blind, randomized, counterbalanced, cross-over studyduring which 24 healthy human participants received...
A set of measures of trauma, dissociation, altered states of consciousness, and spiritual experiences was administered to a convenience sample of 100 inpatients in a hospital Trauma Program. The inpatients had an average Dissociative Experiences Scale score of 42.3 and an average Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale score of 6.6, both of which are very high. Both trauma and dissociation...
AIM: To improve public understanding of the subjective experience of auditory hallucinations and increase empathy towards individuals who hear voices and have other unusual sensory experiences. METHODS: This pilot study developed a new immersive art exhibition, Altered States of Consciousness, which gave members of the public an individualized voice-hearing simulation experience in 2 real-world...
What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been...