June 24, 2026Anaïs Servais, Fleur Gérard, Hélène Mirabel et al.
preprint
Patients with severe anterograde amnesia have been described as "stuck in time"; their mental time travel abilities are altered, and they seem to live in the present. Here, we examine an unusual phenomenon in which severely amnesic patients recurrently report the belief that they have just awakened from an unconscious state. A famous case illustrating this phenomenon was that of Clive Wearing...
Contemporary psychiatric models conceptualize dissociative disorders primarily as stress-induced disruptions in the integration of consciousness, memory, and identity. While DSM-5-TR frameworks and classical psychopathology effectively describe the neurobiological and defensive mechanisms underlying dissociation, they provide limited explanation for the coherent, symbolically meaningful, and...
Clinical trials investigating psychedelic compounds for depression and anxiety-related disorders are yielding promising preliminary results. Psychedelics produce profound alterations in brain function—such as suppression of the default mode network and thalamocortical dysregulation—leading to intense subjective experiences including ego dissolution and mystical-type states. While often...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during sleep involve a transient disruption of bodily self-consciousness, in which the self or center of awareness is experienced as displaced from the physical body. Although OBEs have been reported in neurological, psychiatric, and dissociative contexts, they also occur in non-clinical populations, raising the question of whether their altered-self phenomenology...
This article proposes a definition of advanced meditation which in concise form is the states, stages, and endpoints that arise with the maturation and mastery of awareness skills. Advanced meditation involves experiential and structural mental changes, sometimes radical, to volition, affect, cognition, and self-related processing in the direction of effortlessness, intentional control,...
Despite decades of research, psychiatric pharmacotherapy remains limited in its clinical effectiveness and understanding of therapeutic mechanisms. Dominant approaches, rooted in symptom-scale-driven randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and biological reductionism, often fail to capture the complex, subjective, and context-dependent nature of psychotropic drug effects. In this article, we...
This article presents Biotransenergetics (BTE) as an integral transpersonal psychotherapy grounded in an embodied, participatory, and non-dual epistemology of consciousness. Developed by Pier Luigi Lattuada, BTE proposes a radical redefinition of the therapeutic process through the centrality of the Self, the concept of Transe, and the experiential realization of Essential Transe. The article...
The phenomenon of alien abduction has been widely reported yet remains scientifically contentious. This review synthesizes neuroscientific and psychological findings to elucidate its potential mechanisms. Neural correlates include sleep paralysis, REM intrusion, temporoparietal junction activity, caudate-putamen connectivity, serotonergic modulation (e.g., 5-HT2A receptor) & thanatosis...
This report presents a detailed phenomenological analysis of a self-observed psilocybin experience conducted under controlled conditions and documented through contemporaneous notes and post-session reconstruction. The study focuses on the structure of subjective experience rather than on pharmacological outcomes alone. Particular attention is given to alterations in bodily awareness, spatial...
Effective treatments for prolonged disorders of consciousness (pDoC) remain limited. Grounded in the entropic brain hypothesis-that psychedelic agents facilitate consciousness recovery by increasing brain complexity-this study investigated esketamine, a nonclassical psychedelic drug, and its effects on electroencephalographic (EEG) neurophysiological metrics in pDoC patients. In this...