Altered States of Consciousness

Modes of music listening and modes of subjectivity in everyday life

by Ruth Herbert

Journal of Sonic Studies, Vol. 2(1), May 2012
Available online

Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the... more Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the Industrialized West. Music is heard in a variety of real-world contexts, and qualities of subjective experience might similarly be expected to be wide-ranging. Yet though much is known about function (music as a behavioural resource) less research has focused on ways in which music mediates consciousness. This essay critiques conceptualizations of music listening in extant literature and explores how listening to music in daily life both informs and reflects subjectivity.

Psychological and musicological literature on music listening commonly distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous ways of listening, associating the former with unusual and the latter with mundane, habitual listening scenarios. Empirical findings from my research, which used ethnographic methods to tap qualities of subjective experience, indicate that attentive and diffused listening do not map neatly onto 'special' and 'ordinary' contexts and that a distributed, fluctuating attentional awareness and multimodal focus are central to many experiences of hearing music.

Lo festivo y lo sacramental

by José Manuel Rodríguez

Rodríguez, J.M. 2011. Lo festivo y lo sacramental. Prensa Libre, viernes 15 de junio, p. 16 Opinión.

Shamanic diffusions: A technoshamanic philosophy of electroacoustic music

by Jon Weinel

Forthcoming in Sonic Ideas/Ideas Sonicas

Electroacoustic music affords the possibility of creating journeys through non-realistic or illusory spaces, through... more Electroacoustic music affords the possibility of creating journeys through non-realistic or illusory spaces, through the use of sonic materials.  This article proposes the application of the concept of ‘technoshamanism’ as a principle for composing and performing electroacoustic works of this type.  I shall commence by examining the use of the term ‘technoshaman’ in relation to psy-trance culture.  Through consideration of Rouget’s (1985) definitions of ecstasy and trance, I will discuss the relationship of psy-trance culture to Rouget’s definition of trance.  From this position I shall then propose the use of electroacoustic music in relation to Rouget’s definition of ecstasy.  This will enable me to define ‘shamanic diffusions’ as an opposing technoshamanic approach to that which is used in psy-trance.  Under this discussion, electroacoustic music will be considered as an ecstatic technology.  I shall then conclude with some comments and speculation regarding how this concept may be useful as an approach for the composition and performance of electroacoustic music.  For example, in various composed works I have used altered states of consciousness and hallucinations, as a principle for the design of sonic materials and musical structure.  Through the course of this article then, I will describe a conceptual model through which to consider electroacoustic composition and performance.

Altered states of consciousness as an adaptive principle for composing electroacoustic music

by Jon Weinel

PhD Thesis

The aim of this research was to use altered states of consciousness (ASCs) as an adaptive principle for composing... more The aim of this research was to use altered states of consciousness (ASCs) as an adaptive principle for composing electroacoustic music, in which common features of the ASC experience provide a basis for the design of sonic material and inform the structural design of corresponding musical sections. Various cultures throughout history have sought to undergo visionary journeys using hallucinogenic plants and drugs. In many cases these experiences have been used as a basis for the creation of art, literature and music. Informed by a survey of relevant work, this practice-led research develops a compositional process for creating electroacoustic music that is based upon hallucinogenic perceptual states. Though situated within the electroacoustic idiom, the work also draws significantly upon Western psychedelic culture and electronic dance music. The output is a creative portfolio containing a series of musical compositions, software and video. This supporting commentary describes the compositional processes in detail, and it is hoped that it will be of interest to other creative practitioners dedicated to exploring this theme in music and other mediums.

(forthcoming) A case study of primary process language and body boundary imagery in discourses of religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness

by Laura Cariola

Empirical Text and Cultural Research

Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological... more Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological and psychobiological features, including changes in body boundary awareness. This study aimed to assess the frequency and strength of associations between body boundary imagery and primary process language in the discourses of mystical and psychotic-mystical ASC. The mystical discourse examined here is Saint Teresa of Avila’s (1567) mystical writing "The Way of Perfection”, and the psychotic discourse is Daniel Paul Schreber’s (1903) autobiographical writing “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness”. The mystical text differs from the psychotic text in the frequency of primary process language and penetration imagery. Positive associations were also found between primary process language and penetration imagery, and barrier and penetration imagery, whereas the psychotic text yielded a positive association between barrier and penetration imagery only.

More Seminal Ethics Implications

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Seminal Ethics," "Kant Concept Art," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

These implications are: moral, epistemology, love, happiness, time and space, psychological, art, education, medical, economic, war, capital punishment, and abortion.

"Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" includes additional categories.

Toward a Multidisciplinary Approach to Ayahuasca Studies

by Steve Beyer

A review of the current state of ayahuasca studies: an introduction to the Special Ayahuasca Issue of the journal... more A review of the current state of ayahuasca studies: an introduction to the Special Ayahuasca Issue of the journal Anthropology of Consciousness

Global Citizenship in 2040: Six Scenarios

by Vahid V. Motlagh

1- Placeless Brains Triumph, 2-Planetary Second Life, 3-Multicultural City Islands, 4-Cherished Mental Model, 5-Lagging Global Education, 6-Tribal Towers Tremble

After listening to a presentation that reviewed the scientific discoveries and technological developments,... more After listening to a presentation that reviewed the scientific discoveries and technological developments, participants in the workshop titled Global Placeless Brains at the conference Reconciling Babel – Education for cosmopolitanism were directed in a brief method based scenario planning exercise that was designed and run by the author.They were encouraged to do some “disciplined imagination” about the alternative futures of the global citizenship in 2040. One week after the workshop was concluded their written inputs were analyzed and subsequently six scenarios were developed and named. For more detail about how the tacit knowledge of the participants was tapped and thus documented as explicit knowledge see the Method section below

What Do the Spirits Want from Us?

by Steve Beyer

Shamanism, if nothing else, is a special way of relating to the spirits. The tragic vision of Upper Amazonian... more Shamanism, if nothing else, is a special way of relating to the spirits. The tragic vision of Upper Amazonian shamanism helps teach us the meaning not only of its own ceremonies but also the meaning of vision fasts, talking circles, dreams, and our own encounters with each other.

Experiencing and experimenting with embodied archaeology: Re-embodying the sacred gestures of Neopalatial Minoan Crete

by Erin McGowan

Published in Archaeological Review from Cambridge 2006

Portals

by Lynne HUME

An empirical study of normative dissociation in musical and non-musical everyday life experiences

by Ruth Herbert

Now available online,  in advance of publication in Psychology of Music

Dissociative experiences involving music have received little research attention outside the field of ethnomusicology.... more Dissociative experiences involving music have received little research attention outside the field of ethnomusicology. This paper examines the psychological characteristics of normative dissociation (detachment) across musical and non-musical experiences in ‘real world’, everyday settings. It draws upon a subset of data arising from an empirical project designed to compare transformative shifts of consciousness, with and without music in daily life, and the ways in which use of music may facilitate the processes of dissociation and absorption. Twenty participants kept unstructured diaries for two weeks, recording free descriptions of involving experiences of any kind as soon as possible after their occurrence. All descriptions were subsequently subjected to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).

Results suggest that dissociative experiences are a familiar occurrence in everyday life. Diary entries highlight an established practice of actively sought detachment from self, surroundings or activity, suggesting that, together with absorption, the processes of derealization (altered perception of surroundings) and depersonalization (detachment from self) constitute common means of self-regulation in daily life. Music emerges as a particularly versatile facilitator of dissociative experience because of its semantic ambiguity, portability, and the variety of ways in which it may mediate perception, so facilitating an altered relationship to self and environment.

Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Novelist and Agrarian Reformer Louis Bromfield

by David Seamon

Originally published In Writings in Place: John Burroughs and his Legacy, ed. D. Payne (pp. 158-73). Newcastle, Great Britain: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Though relatively unknown today, American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896—1956) was regarded in... more Though relatively unknown today, American novelist and agrarian reformer Louis Bromfield (1896—1956) was regarded in the 1920s as one of America’s most promising young writers. A major theme in many of Bromfield’s works is the 20th-century loss of a lived sensitivity to the natural world percipitated in part by American industrialism and materialism. At the same time, Bromfield sought to resurrect a style of environmental encounter whereby plants, animals, and places could be seen as they were in themselves and thereby be genuinely cared for and protected.

One label he used for this sympathetic way of knowing nature is “teched”—a colloquial word referring to a capacity for experiencing an intuitive intimacy with things, creatures, and landscapes such that the boundaries of self and other dissolve. Bromfield believed that such direct openness to the world was essential to understanding nature and for using it in a responsible, sustainable way, especially in regard to particular places, including his home region of northern central Ohio.

In this paper, I draw on two of Bromfield’s short stories—“Up Ferguson Way” and “The Pond” (both written in 1944)—to examine the experiential dimensions of “teched” and to indicate how this mode of encounter relates to attachment to place.

Key words: Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, environmental experience, place, attachment to place, love of nature, phenomenology of place

Partial REM-sleep deprivation increases the dream-like quality of mentation from REM sleep and sleep onset (2005)

by Tore Nielsen

Describing and modeling hypnagogic imagery using a systematic self-observation procedure (1995)

by Tore Nielsen

The published literature suggests that systematic self- observation may be a suitable method for clarifying the nature... more The published literature suggests that systematic self- observation may be a suitable method for clarifying the nature and correlates of hypnagogic imagery and thus a useful adjunct to psychophysiological and cognitive studies of sleep onset. The potential applicability of one recently proposed self-observation procedure (Nielsen, 1992) to such studies is demonstrated in the present work. The procedure permits numerous hypnagogic images to be collected during spontaneous drowsy periods occurring during the day. The observer sits in an upright, head-unsupported position, fixes an observational intent, and pays attention to internal events; images are observed, transcribed and then assessed for their likely memory sources. The procedure has been pilot-tested by the author in four exploratory studies comprising over 250 hypnagogic images. Neuromuscular events accompanying these images (e.g., head nods, leg jerks) and EEG correlates of the images are described. Certain distinctions among imagery types are suggested, e.g., fleeting vs. fully-formed, images with self movement vs. images with non-self movement. Silberer's conclusions regarding the 'autosymbolic' function of hypnagogic images are supported and extended by the results. Four types of memory element (immediate, short-, medium-, and long-term) appear to have contributed causally to the formation of these hypnagogic images and are illustrated. To demonstrate how the self- observational method may be used to model the formation of hypnagogic imagery from such memory sources, a single sample image and its multiple memory sources are described and analyzed in detail.

Chronobiology of dreaming (2004)

by Tore Nielsen

Changes in the kinesthetic content of dreams following somatosensory stimulation of leg muscles during REM sleep (1993)

by Tore Nielsen

Musical and non-musical involvement in daily life: The case of absorption

by Ruth Herbert

Now available online, in advance of publication in Musicae Scientiae Vol. 16(1) in 2012

The construct of absorption (effortless engagement) has been the subject of a small number of discipline-specific... more The construct of absorption (effortless engagement) has been the subject of a small number of discipline-specific studies of involvement, including music. This paper reports the results of an empirical project that compared psychological qualities of absorption in everyday music listening scenarios with characteristics of non-music-related involvement. Absorption was located in “real-world” settings, and experiences across different activities in a variety of contexts were tapped as soon as possible after they occurred. The inquiry was designed to test two assumptions that have underpinned previous absorption research: first, that certain activities are inherently particularly absorbing; second, that absorption is best conceptualized primarily as a trait as opposed to a state. Twenty participants kept diaries for two weeks, recording descriptions of involving experiences of any kind. Eight weeks after submitting descriptive reports they completed the Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale (Jamieson, 2005). Diaries indicated that different activities shared a subset of involving features, and confirmed the importance of multi-sensory perception and the imaginative faculty to absorbed experiences. Music may be a particularly effective agent in the facilitation of absorption because it affords multiple potential entry points to involvement (acoustic attributes, source specification, entrainment, emotion, fusion of modalities) and because its semantic malleability makes it adaptable to a variety of circumstances. The MODTAS provided insufficient evidence for establishing correlations between state and trait absorption. It is argued that state and trait divisions are constructs that are inherently problematic.

Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, phenomenology and ontology

by David Luke

Luke, D. (2011). Discarnate entities and dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, phenomenology and ontology. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 75, 26-42.

The highly psychoactive molecule N,N -dimethyltryptamine (or simply DMT), is found naturally occurring in the brains... more The highly psychoactive molecule N,N -dimethyltryptamine (or simply DMT), is found naturally occurring in the brains of humans, mammals, and some other animals, as well as in a broad range of species of the plant kingdom. Although speculative, neurochemical research suggests that DMT may be made in the pineal gland, and it is hypothesised that, as much as melatonin helps activate sleep cycles, DMT activates dreaming, and may also be implicated in other natural visionary states such as mystical experience, near-death experience (NDE), spontaneous psi and psychosis. Amazonian shamans have made use of this chemical for its visionary properties for thousands of years, most likely, and take it as part of a decoction frequently called ayahuasca, which translates from Quechua as “vine of the spirits” or “vine of the dead”. The psychedelic brew is taken because it gives rise to extraordinary mental phenomena that have shamanic and supposed healing qualities, such as synaesthesia, ostensible extra-dimensional percepts, out-of-body experiences, psi experiences and perhaps most commonly, encounters with discarnate entities. When described by independent and seemingly naïve DMT participants the entities encountered tend to vary in detail but often belong to one of a very few similar types, with similar behavioural characteristics. For instance, mischievous shapeshifting elves, preying mantis alien brain surgeons and jewel-encrusted reptilian beings, who all seem to appear with baffling predictability. This opens up a wealth of questions as to the reality (i.e., the ontology) of these entities. The discussion of the phenomenology and ontology of these entities mixes research from parapsychology, ethnobotany and psychopharmacology – the fruits of science – with the foamy custard of folklore, anthropology, mythology, cultural studies and related disciplines. Hopefully however, given the varied readership of this journal, it won’t prove to be a trifle too interdisciplinary.

Psychedelics and Species Connectedness

by David Luke

Krippner, S., & Luke, D. (2009). Psychedelics and species connectedness. Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 19 (1), 12-15.

Psychedelic shamanism might be thought of primarily as a communication with Nature, for instance by asking the plants... more Psychedelic shamanism might be thought of primarily as a communication with Nature, for instance by asking the plants directly which ones can heal a particular illness, or by asking the plant spirit to teach them, or by using the plant in aiding the psychological metamorphosis into a plant or animal “allies.” Given that shamans have most likely been communicating with Nature in this way for thousands of years, it might well be asked what can be gained for humanity’s relationship with the ecosystem from such a dialogue and, perhaps more importantly, how can Nature benefit from this relationship?