Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments in prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the startle response. Hallucinogenic 5-HT(2A) receptor agonists are used for animal models of schizophrenia because they mimic some symptoms of schizophrenia in humans and induce PPI deficits in animals. Nevertheless, one report indicates that the 5-HT(2A) receptor agonist psilocybin increases PPI in healthy humans....
Abstract Hypnosis appears to generate unusual—and sometimes even astonishing—changes in the contents of consciousness. Hypnotic subjects report perceiving things that are not there, they report not perceiving things that are there, and they report unusual alterations in the phenomenology of agency. In addition to apparent alterations in the contents of consciousness, hypnosis also appears to...
Transpersonal Anthropology (hereafter ‘TA’) is a growing field within Social Anthropology. It has many similarities with Transpersonal Psychology and, I believe, can offer useful ideas and approaches to study. In particular, it offers a much wider view of human experience than Western psychology because it is based on non-Western peoples, their concepts, philosophies, ways of life and...
The author has a concept of illness which perceives it mainly as a loss of self-confidence, of acceptance and of being integrated as a part of a greater entirety. Therefore therapy has to offer support in order to allow the awareness of these values to grow. The main means to do this is the accompaniment of the patient into an altered state of consciousness. The author describes the use of...
Most theories of ritual are based on ethnographic descriptions of ritual actions around the globe. This chapter focuses on the representations of experiences during rituals and on the subjective theories about these rituals by participants of the European Santo Daime church. The author research is concerned with substance-induced altered states of consciousness and the chapter attempts to link...
alive, as did everyday experience. After I came down from the LSD trip, I was deliberately determined to hold onto that freedom—adetermination informed by a structural psychological awareness that had been obtained in the intensity of my earlier psychotherapy experience.My subsequent introduction tomarijuana freed me of physical and sexual awkwardness, turned me onto intimate discourse,...
Meditation in general can be understood as a state of complete and unintentional silent and motionless concentration on an activity, an item or an idea. Subjectively, meditative experience is said to be fundamentally different from "normal" mental states and is characterized by terms like timelessness, boundlessness and lack of self-experience. In recent years, several fMRI- and PET-studies...
To the Editor.—Dextromethorphan is the d-isomer of the codeine analog, levorphanol, and the active ingredient in >100 over-the-counter cough and cold preparations. Reports of dextromethorphan abuse date back to the 1960s.1,2 There is some evidence suggesting that when used inappropriately at very high doses (eg, 1500 mg/day), dextromethorphan can result in a dependence-like syndrome.2...
Previous investigations of the subjective effects of MDMA (material sold as ecstasy) have conducted interviews and surveys of various groups of ecstasy users within particular sub-populations. This study examined subjective drug effects reported by different sub-populations of ecstasy users and explored whether the function or purpose served by using ecstasy influenced the nature of the drug...