17 Telepathy is generally the most commonly reported experience psychokinesis tends to be the least common. 15 Their prevalence ranges from 18% for psi among Indian ‘mind-expanding drug’ users 16 to 83% for telepathy experiences among Californian student cannabis smokers. Typically, the greater the use of such substances, the greater is the number of psi-type experiences. There is a consistent trend in the surveys for increased reporting of psi-related phenomena from psychedelic substance users. This is the case in historical reports by missionaries and explorers working in shamanic cultures, in later reports by anthropologists and ethnobotanists, and in surveys of recreational users. Relative to other psychoactive substances, psychedelic substances are consistently reported to induce psi-like experiences. Thus, the prevalence of well-attested psi phenomena is much greater than that which occurs in ordinary psychotherapy. Psi phenomena with good supporting evidence were found to occur in roughly 2% of cases where therapy patients ingested psychedelics. Many reports of psi experiences emerged the 1950s and 1960s, a time when psychedelics were being utilized extensively as aids to psychotherapy in the treatment of psychogenic disorders. However, indigenous shamanic knowledge of psychedelic substances goes back several millennia, according to the archaeological evidence 11 while a wealth of spontaneous psi-related experiences has been reported in relation to the ingestion of psychedelics – in experimental, clinical and recreational contexts. Intellectuals, scientists, explorers and academics in the developed world have only encountered them within the last hundred years or so. They are defined as those ‘which, without causing physical addiction, craving, major physiological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia, more or less reliably produce thought, mood, and perceptual changes’. ‘Psychedelics’ is the name given to a class of psychoactive substances such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ketamine and ayahuasca. 9 Types of ASCs Psychedelically-Induced States 8 Such work has in some cases led to the development of laboratory-based protocols – notably the ganzfeld method – that exploit specific altered states in order to maximize psi detection under controlled conditions. 7įurthermore, insights about the genuine nature of psi may arise from the exploration of such states outside laboratory-controlled conditions in their natural environment. 5 On the other hand, it is arguably wrong to consign experiences that occur in altered states to the catchall wastebasket term of ‘hallucination’ 6 insights arising from such states should be treated as potentially as insightful as those arising from ordinary states. Sources of possible cognitive error include confabulation, misperception, misremembering, misjudgement of probability, situational context, prior beliefs and individual knowledge.
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However, certain spontaneous experiences – notably near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and sleep paralysis 4 – actually are the states of consciousness under study, since they are defined by their phenomenological features.Īnother problem arises from the distortions to ordinary perceptual and cognitive processes in the altered state, which intensify the vulnerability of subjective psi-type experiences to ordinary cognitive biases and misperceptions.
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Some go so far as to define the state as the experience that ensues from a specific procedure. Researchers often assume that the induction method is sufficient to produce the desired state of consciousness, failing to provide the phenomenological or physiological measurements that would establish this. This has unfortunately not been done with much research on ASCs, both within and outside parapsychology. States of consciousness need to be distinguished from the procedures used to induce them. Myers’s ideas on state changes, consciousness and automatisms influenced scholars of consciousness, notably the American psychologist William James. 1 He speculated that changes in states of consciousness induced the movement of psychic material from the ‘subliminal’ (unconscious) mind to the ‘supraliminal’ consciousness (above the threshold of awareness), in the form of ‘automatisms’ such as telepathic interactions.
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Frederic Myers, a co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, was among the first scientists to draw attention to the links between ASCs and psychic phenomena, to be followed by many more distinguished parapsychologists.