Recreational Psychedelic Users Frequently Encounter Complete Mystical Experiences: Trip Content and Implications for Wellbeing

A growing proportion of the population is engaging in recreational psychedelic use. Psychedelics are uniquely capable of reliably occasioning mystical experiences in ordinary humans without contemplative or religious backgrounds. While clinical research has made efforts to characterize psychedelic experiences, comparably little is understood about how humans naturalistically engage with psychedelics. The present study employs a mixed-methods approach to examine the content and implications of psychedelic and mystical experiences, occurring outside of laboratory settings. We use text mining analyses to arrive at a qualitative description of psychedelic experiential content by abstracting from over two-thousand written reports of first-person psychedelic experiences. Following up, we conducted quantitative analyses on psychometric data from a large survey (N = 1424) to reveal associations between psychedelic use practices, complete mystical experiences, and psychological wellbeing. Topic-modelling and sentiment analyses present a bottom-up description of human interactions with psychedelic compounds and the content of such experiences. Psychometric results suggest psychedelic users encounter complete mystical experiences in high proportions, dependent on factors such as drug type and dose-response effects. Furthermore, a salient association was established between diverse metrics of wellbeing and those with complete mystical experiences. Our results paint a new picture of the growing relationships between humans and psychedelic experiences in the real-world use context. Ordinary humans appear to encounter complete mystical experiences via recreational psychedelic use, and such experiences are strongly associated with improved psychological wellbeing.

What Blindsight Means for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness

Do perceptual experiences always inherit the content of their neural correlates? Most scientists and philosophers working on perception say 'yes'. They hold the view that an experience's content just is (i.e.is identical to) the content of its neural correlate. This paper presses back against this view, while trying to retain as much of its spirit as possible. The paper argues that type-2 blindsight experiences are plausible cases of experiences which lack the content of their neural correlates. They are not experiences of the stimuli or stimulus properties prompting them, but their neural correlates represent these stimulus properties. The argument doesn't depend on any special view of what it is for an experience to be of a stimulus or stimulus property. The upshot is that, even assuming there is a deep relationship between experiential content and neural content, that relationship is more complex than simple identity.

Oscillatory Components of Psychedelic Experience

As humanity has been utilizing psychedelic substances for millennia, much knowledge has already been accumulated about the exploratory potential and therapeutic power of the psychedelic-induced nonordinary states of consciousness (NSC). However, we still have only a limited understanding of the process that unfolds in mind and the brain. Only recently have systematic investigations become possible, as the myths about psychedelics are abating and the legal strictures gradually loosening. With the availability of brain imaging techniques, exciting findings have been made about the associated dynamic brain processes. Our prospective observations of spontaneously generated NSC, major mood disorders, have been elucidating another dynamic aspect, the oscillatory brain processes. The findings indicate that the NSC’s propensity is markedly increased at the peaks of the oscillatory brain activity and that the NSC entirely unfolds when the oscillations exceed their normal range. The observation that neurobiological correlates of experientially opposite NSC, melancholy and mania, appear qualitatively the same is compatible with the concept that the experiential content is emerging from nonlocal consciousness. Psychedelic experiences are triggered by the administration of the psychedelic drug. However, they are influenced by nondrug factors and molded, in particular, by the individual’s mental set and the setting of the session. The transformative process can be utilized psychotherapeutically for healing and profound inner restructuring.

Neural dynamics of stroboscopic stimulation at different stimulation frequencies

Stroboscopic stimulation has been previously shown to induce visual hallucinations and altered states of consciousness, state by entraining the brain to the driving frequency, similar to those reported during the psychedelics although little systematic research exists on the effect of specific stimulation frequency on experience. The present study investigated the effects of different stroboscopic stimulation frequencies on neural dynamics, such as signal diversity (Lempel-Ziv complexity) and spectral power and attempted to relate these changes to self-reported changes in experiential content. The results indicated that the stimulation frequencies near the alpha band (8 to 12 Hz) caused the greatest increase across all neural measures, with 8 Hz consistently displaying the most pronounced results, relative to baseline. All tested frequencies led to an increase in all experiential dimensions, relative to baseline.

Who says what?: exploring the impacts of content type and blog type on brand credibility, brand similarity and eWOM intention

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to conduct an exploratory study to discover if presenting consumers with a certain content type (i.e. product-focused content with informational appeal, institution-focused content with emotional appeal, experience-focused content with emotional appeal,) and blog type (i.e. a corporate, sponsored or a personal blog) persuade consumers to form perceptions of credibility and similarity toward the fashion brand, which leads them to further engage with the brand through Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM).Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a 3(content type: product-focused, institution-focused, experience-focused) x 3(blog type: corporate, sponsored and personal) between-subjects design. Mock fashion blogs and content were developed in order to provide a realistic blogging experience for the participants. With 511 usable data collected, ANOVA was employed to test the relationships.FindingsFindings reveal that content type, specifically product-focused content and experiential content, is an important consideration for illustrating similarities between the brand and consumers compared to institutional content. Product-focused content is found to be effective in encouraging consumer eWOM for the brand as well. Further, the interaction effect of blog type and content type was significant in establishing brand credibility. However, blog type did not influence any of the dependent variable.Originality/valueThis study brings meaningful suggestions to fashion brands on effective blog campaign, which eventually provide insights on how brands can influence female consumers to shape positive evaluation toward the brand.

The problem of sense making in communication

The article analyzes explanatory potential of the structural/formal and cognitive models of language as well as coding-encoding, cognitive, inferential, and interactional models of communication to outline alternative explanations of sense making shaped by the models of enacted and situated cognition. It puts forward a conception of communication as an intersubjective interaction in a socially-culturally constructed intersubjective act, initiated by a subject’s focusing attention on a communicative (verbal-coverbal) action of the other subject, which triggers parallel mental processes (involving active perception, affect, cognition, volition, and action) that pass into each other and combine the conscious with the subconscious. Mental structures activated in the act (propositions, images (images-memories as well as images-fantasies; visual and motoric images (patterns of behavior); memories of phrases, gestures, colors, sounds, fragments of melodies, tastes, smells, tactile sensations; inner sensations/anticipations, fragmentary wishes, and moods) self-organize around the subject’s dominant motive to form the current semantic configuration. This dominant motive determines both the intention of the communicative action and the inferences made in the process of interpretation of the communicative action. The article claims that sense making in verbal-coverbal communication does not rest on the conventional nature of a linguistic unit (which all the analyzed models of language and communication eventually appeal to). It rests on the intersubjective nature of human consciousness, a hard-wired capacity of a human social being to share experiential content (thoughts, sensations, emotions, actions), which is being developed in a socially and culturally constructed context of everyday engagements with other social beings.

Blast from the Past

This chapter considers the psychological mechanism known as episodic memory. Episodic memory is defined as a process whereby an emotion is induced in a listener because the music evokes a personal memory of a specific event in the person's life; when the memory is evoked, so is also the emotion associated with the event. The emotion can be intense, perhaps because the physiological response pattern to the original event is stored in memory, together with the experiential content. Episodic memory requires detached mental representations (i.e. representations of events or objects that are not currently sensed in the external world) and a sense of self, which ties together the individual episodes. Episodic memory is also an important aspect of what it means to be human.

Pleasant Musical Imagery

This article introduces the notion of pleasant musical imagery (PMI) for denoting everyday phenomena where people want to cherish music “in their heads.” This account differs from current paradigms for studying musical imagery in that it is not based a priori on (in)voluntariness of the experience. An empirical investigation of the structure and experiential content in 50 persons’ experiences of PMI applied the elicitation interview method. Peer judgments of the interviews helped to bridge a phenomenological investigation of particular experiences with systematic between-subjects analysis. Both structural features of the imagery (e.g., Looseness of structure or Looping) and content features of the imagery (e.g., Embodied evocativeness and Object-directedness) showed significant associations with participants’ individual characteristics, personality, and/or cognitive style. The approach taken suggests a new paradigm for studying musical imagery—one that is based on tracing the interactional and enactive processes of “inner listening.”