This study develops the methodological framework advanced in Rock, Baynes, and Casey's (2005) experimental study of ostensibly shamanic journeying imagery in naïve participants. Specifically, the present study experimentally investigates the impact of the word landscape, featured in Harner's (1990) shamanic journeying to the Lower World instructions, on the number of landscape‐related images...
Hallucinations are complex psychopathological phenomena. Nevertheless, this has not always been clear in the scientific literature, until recently. In the following paper, the phenomenology of hallucinations will be (briefly) described. Then, ways in which examining phenomenological characteristics of hallucinations may have theoretical and clinical implications, will be presented. Assessment...
This article analyzes (1) the production of magical or symbolic power and (2) symbolic processes of transcendence in the rituals of Tamang shamans of highland Nepal, rituals that seek to transform the afflicted from abject subjects to active agents. In convergence with Terence Turner’s theoretical contributions to the study of ritual, this article argues that magical power produced by Tamang...
Transcendental near-death experiences show some cross-cultural variation that suggests they may be influenced by societal beliefs. The prevailing Western model of near-death experiences was defined by Moody's description of the phenomenon in 1975. To explore the influence of this cultural model, we compared near-death experience accounts collected before and after 1975. We compared the...
This review of the literature aims to identify the acute effects of MDMA (ecstasy) in healthy volunteers. The wide range of relevant but methodologically diverse tests was .rst grouped into clusters to allow an evaluation of tests that would otherwise have been excluded due to their low frequency of utilization. The following three types of tests were evaluated: (1) functional tests quantifying...
We formulate and study a quantum field theory of a microtubule, a basic element of living cells. Following the quantum theory of consciousness by Hameroff and Penrose, we let the system to reduce to one of the classical states without measurement if certain conditions are satisfied(self-reductions), and calculate the self-reduction time $τ_N$ (the mean interval between two successive...
NeuroimageFebruary 15, 2006Kristen A McKiernan, Benjamin R D'Angelo, Jacqueline N Kaufman et al.
In functional neuroimaging, a local decrease in blood flow during an active task, relative to a "resting" baseline, is referred to as task-induced deactivation (TID). TID may occur when resources shift from ongoing, internally generated processing typical of "resting" states to processing required by an exogenous task. We previously found specific brain regions in which TID increased as task...
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century a foreboding of crisis and impending doom was felt by European intellectuals, ideologues, and literati. Regarding Austria in particular, a widespread omen of imminent collapse in the realm of politics, prevalent among the upper classes, reflected a general awareness that the liberal ideals upon which bourgeois culture was presumed to be founded...
AbstractFunctionalism is the view in the philosophy of mind that that what makes some state of some system a mental state is what that state does in the system.
AbstractAdvances in, and links between, neurobiology and psychology as applied in the study of sleep and dreaming compared to the waking state are increasingly revealing significant evidence for the brain basis of consciousness.