The International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology
September 9, 2026
B Richardson, J O'Byrne, V Bruno et al.
Abstract Background Psychedelics induce altered states of consciousness (AOC) with profound perceptual, cognitive, and emotional shifts, often linked to positive therapeutic outcomes. Although serotonergic psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, and 5-MeO-DMT share receptor targets, they differ in behavioral and neural effects. How these compounds alter cortical dynamics relative to other...
Mental Health Practice
September 8, 2026
Madelaine Watkins
In 2020, a clinical nurse specialist (CNS) role dedicated to older people experiencing voices, visions and unshared beliefs (VVUBs) – often termed ‘psychosis’ – was created in the Mental Health Services for Older People at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. One of the drivers for this new role was the wish to shift from a biomedical approach to a trauma-informed, human rights-focused...
OPUS Kempten
September 7, 2026
Tim C. Greinus, Tobias C. Breiner
BDSM and gaming have so far always been studied separately, although both fields share key commonalities: role-playing, rule structures, immersion, escapism and altered states of consciousness. The present study empirically investigates whether individuals who both play video games and practise BDSM report similar patterns of experience and coping in both areas. A dataset of participants who...
September 7, 2026
Nathan Harter
The natural sciences have been reluctant to base findings upon certain types of experiences, which, for present purposes, we might call altered consciousness. At the very least, the following four experiences resemble one another, namely dreams, hallucinogens, delusions, and poetry. At their root, these so-called irruptions raise doubts about the reliability of what people perceive under their...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 7, 2026
Flávio Marco Rego da Silva
preprint
Meditation research has measured isolated physiological channels for decades, but the set of peripheral signs has rarely been treated as a field — a totality whose inter-channel dependency structure is itself the observable. We tested whether a guided meditation session moves the integrated peripheral field, or only the individual signs, in the public WESAD dataset (15 subjects; within-subject...
September 7, 2026
Karen Peoples
Karen Peoples, Ph.D., from the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco believes that telepathic dreams between patient and analyst are “surprisingly common” and can occur so frequently for some individuals as to seem “quite ordinary.” However, for Karen, the impact of shared similar dreams between her and her patient collided for her “with an electric shock,”...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 4, 2026
Elena Ryss
preprint
A prominent view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind holds that consciousness is metacognition—that subjective experience is reducible to the brain monitoring, evaluating, and commenting on its own operations. This article challenges that claim. We argue that qualia—the elementary, irreducible qualities of lived experience—are fundamentally distinct from metacognition, which is...
Brain Communications
September 3, 2026
Desirée Conti, Tommaso Accinni, Alice Teghil et al.
Abstract Visual awareness includes the ability to distinguish internally generated sensory experience from veridical percepts derived from the external world. Visual hallucinations (VH) are an example of internally generated experience with important clinical implications and are common in Lewy body disease (LBD), with some patients aware of their hallucinations and others not. The awareness...
Royal Society Open Science
September 2, 2026
Trevor Hewitt, Anil K. Seth, David J. Schwartzman
Abstract: Hallucinations arise from disruptions in neural processes that construct perceptual experience from sensory input. Progress in consciousness science may therefore benefit from methods that precisely characterize their phenomenology. We provide an initial validation of the Six-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ), a brief instrument designed to quantify visual...
Journal for the Study of Spirituality
September 2, 2026
Jing Liu-Helmersson, Helene Lindmark, Annette Andersson
This study attempts to use quantum physics to understand spirituality in Sámi traditional healing. Sámi are Indigenous people from Arctic Europe. Research methods include a theoretical model and an in-depth interview study with five healers from North Sweden (three have a Sámi background/blood). The theoretical model is based on two physics concepts: quantum entanglement and complex spacetime....