Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 23, 2026
Benjamin Pham
preprint
This paper examines dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as one of the most unusual and scientifically provocative psychoactive substances ever studied. It traces DMT’s history from Indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca traditions and Richard Spruce’s nineteenth-century observations to twentieth-century psychedelic science, countercultural fascination, prohibition, and the modern revival of clinical research. The...
iScience
August 21, 2026
Antje Peters, Merit Ohlsen, Jens Bölte et al.
Interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly prominent in everyday life. Modern AI can produce intelligent, witty, and even sarcastic responses, leading people to assume AI is conscious. This raises the question whether AI is perceived as conscious, and how people respond to such machines behaviorally and neurally. This preregistered electroencephalogram (EEG) study...
Wiley eBooks
August 20, 2026
Jenny Wade, Audrey Redfield, Marie Thouin-Savard
The electronic dance music (EDM) scene has been the subject of considerable research since the 1990s, including the research into its transpersonal aspects. Russell Newcombe, a researcher on drug use and drug policy, conducted the first study of EDM culture to understand club drug use in order to inform public health initiatives on harm reduction policies at EDM events. Completely aside from...
Wiley eBooks
August 20, 2026
Jenny Wade, Phyllis Alongi, Jacqueline Hermida
This chapter explores the distinguishing features of transpersonal psychotherapy. Transpersonal psychotherapy occurs in a context of spiritual unfolding, holds consciousness as central to the process, works in multiple dimensions, and focuses on psycho-spiritual transformation beyond the healing and growth of the self. It is the therapeutic clinical application of ordinary and non-ordinary...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
August 20, 2026
Atakan Selte, Steven E. Haworth, Thomas J. Vanasse et al.
preprint
Abstract Identifying neural signatures of consciousness remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Sleep offers a tractable model for comparing brain activity in the presence or absence of subjective experience while minimizing behavioral responsiveness confounds. Using overnight 256-electrode high-density EEG in 140 participants and a serial-awakening paradigm, we analyzed 699 non-rapid eye...
Proa Revista de Antropologia e Arte
August 19, 2026
Susan Elizabeth Rocha
This research addresses visionary practices in contemporary Ecuadorian art, focusing on their relationship with the ritual ingestion of San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi) and Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi). From a perspective grounded in animist ontologies, which understand nature as a vast web of interconnected beings with interiority, the study analyzes how these master plants function as...
Cells
August 18, 2026
Bernard Kordas
The reversible effects of general anesthesia can be used to examine how brain activity changes during transitions into and out of altered conscious states. Such changes are commonly tracked using behavioral responses, electroencephalographic recordings, and measures of functional connectivity. These measures, however, reflect processes occurring at lower levels of organization, including the...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 17, 2026
Karel Hrubec
preprint
Before a Marker Becomes a Mechanism develops an adversarial synthetic falsification framework for evaluating dynamical markers in consciousness research before they are granted strong mechanistic interpretation. The study emerged from the progressive failure of its own candidate mechanism. An initial three-step causal-closure metric failed to capture longer directed loops. A generalized...
Current Biology
August 17, 2026
Jacinthe Cataldi, Andria Pelentritou, Sophie Schwartz et al.
The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). However, how the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal cardiac...
Psychedelics
August 14, 2026
Robert McGrath, Everett B. Sackett
Artificial intelligence is entering psychedelic-assisted therapy (PaT) through at least two channels, pre-licensure facilitator training simulators and in-session administrative tools. This arrival is occurring in a context where relational factors, those interpersonal considerations between patients and providers, are not incidental but highly impactful. A 2025 international Delphi consensus...