Responses to psychedelics are notoriously difficult to predict, yet significant work is currently underway to assess their therapeutic potential and the level of interest in psychedelics among the general public appears to be increasing. We aimed to collect prospective data in order to improve our ability to predict acute- and longer-term responses to psychedelics. Individuals who planned to...
Previous work demonstrated that placebo brain stimulation can function as an experimental tool to elicit mystical and quasi-mystical (i.e., extraordinary) experiences. However, it has not yet been investigated whether these effects result from mere sensory deprivation and individual differences in suggestibility, or whether expectancy manipulations are crucial in eliciting these effects. In...
Trait-like anomalies of subjective experience (aka, Basic Self-disturbance or Self-disorder, SD) have been empirically identified as schizophrenia-specific markers of vulnerability in several clinical and genetic high-risk populations. However, such specificity is still to be tested in developmental years, where emerging psychopathology is less crystallized and diagnostic boundaries more...
NeuropharmacologyNovember 2018I Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, W Lawn, E Krupitsky et al.
Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic drug which acts on the central nervous system chiefly through antagonism of the n-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor. Recently, ketamine has attracted attention as a rapid-acting anti-depressant but other studies have also reported its efficacy in reducing problematic alcohol and drug use. This review explores the preclinical and clinical research into...
Previous research reported that meaningful entertainment experiences are associated with elevation, mixed affect, physical indicators, and moral motivations. The importance of values, particularly altruistic values and self-transcendence, was thought to play a central role. Although the importance of values has been found to vary across cultures, little research so far has examined cultural...
Seorang profesional mengaku mendengar panggilan Tuhan untuk meninggalkan pekerjaannya yang mapan untuk melayani sebagai relawan di daerah terpencil. Seorang penderita suatu penyakit mengaku melihat sosok bercahaya yang mengatakan bahwa ia akan segera sembuh, dan esok harinya ia benar-benar sembuh. Seorang yang sedang menghadapi dilema mengaku merasakan dorongan di dalam hatinya untuk membuka...
Just as the festival offers participants an opportunity to express communal experience, a communion connecting lived-bodies in the celebration, pilgrimage and other forms of spiritual journey afford similar encounters. Along the Camino de Santiago in Spain, towns and villages enact festivals associated with their adopted saints; the culmination of these celebrations associated with the Camino...
INTRODUCTION Union with Christ stands at the very apex of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The whole of our personal relationship to God can be summed up in such terms. John Calvin agreed when he wrote, "For we await salvation from Him not because He appears to us a far off, but because He makes us engrafted into His body, participates not only in all His benefits but also in Himself"...
Cambridge University had the honour of being the first to welcome the new thought. Between Descartes and the Cambridge writers there was a certain identity of aim in that both sought for a basis in reason for man’s moral and religious experience. Though it is a mistake to represent mystic ecstasy as the centre of its teaching, it is true that the main interest of the school was religious. Its...
Spiritual experience commands the quality of attention. Spirituality has been called the psychological or experiential counterpart to dogma. Definitions can be broad or narrow in scope as found among the papers in the 1967 Durham Conference on Spirituality. For the spiritually homeless, the broader definitions are more relevant. Spiritual experience begins at the point where theological or...