One-on-one professional support during labor is recognized for its role in promoting physiological birth, reducing interventions, and enhancing women's birthing experiences. Throughout physiological birth, many women encounter an altered state of consciousness. This state not only facilitates the normal birth process but also empowers women during and after childbirth. Recently, the flow-a...
This preliminary study explores the role of Sufi chanting in inducing Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that is known as Fana in Sufism. Sufi chanting such as Zikr is a prevalent spiritual practice in Islamic mystical tradition, well-known for its profound impact on mental health and spiritual growth. This preliminary study investigates the mechanisms of these chanting practices through...
This study aimed to develop and validate a novel Female Expanded Sexual Response Scale (FESRS). Additionaly, it explores the relationship between sexual response and mindfulness. Development of the scale consisted of three phases: (1) item generation and scale development, (2) psychometric evaluation (reliability testing, factor analysis, and construct validity comparisons with the Sexual...
The drive to find one unifying theory, one overarching universal principle that would subsume and explain all, has been a common theme of human striving for knowledge for many centuries. It reflects, perhaps, a deep intuition that within every experience there is such a unifying singular essence, present yet ordinarily hidden, which when discovered would restore one to the wholeness of...
Touch has long been an essential element in human communication and healing. In the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), the role of touch (and by extension, non-touch) presents complex ethical and practical challenges, particularly due to the heightened vulnerability of individuals in altered states of consciousness. Recent public discourse, including reports of boundary violations and...
Abstract Both literature and science contain numerous descriptions of so-called self-transcendent experiences, which seem to deeply alter the boundaries between the self and the rest of the world. The subjects of these experiences often report feeling extended to the world, united with it, or, conversely, feeling retracted from it, as if they were tiny or insignificant. Sometimes, they report...
Abstract Breathwork which increases ventilatory rate or depth represents an accessible nonpharmacological modality for potentially inducing altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Despite gaining traction as a therapeutic tool, empirical research remains limited, hence we conducted the first randomised-controlled trial (NCT06916312) on breathwork and ASCs. We examined the effects of a single...
This novel qualitative study examines the lived experiences of long-term participants in ayahuasca spiritual communities (ASCs) in the United States. Semi-structured interviews ( n = 11) were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis indicating that these communities (1) attract individuals seeking healing from trauma, addiction, and psychological distress, while offering a sense of belonging...
The effects of top-down attention on perception have been intensively studied using binary categorization tasks (e.g., seen vs. unseen). However, such tasks poorly characterise the quality of experience, or qualia, for short. To characterise attentional effects on qualia, we combined a dual-task attention paradigm with similarity rating tasks to examine whether relational structures of qualia...
Abstract Psilocybin induces profound alterations in consciousness, yet prevailing neural models often describe a monolithic change in brain connectivity that may not fully capture the multifaceted nature of the psychedelic state. To test the hypothesis of a composite neural state, this study applied a robust, data-driven framework, Connectome Independent Component Analysis (connICA) with...