Intact neurophysiological markers of death denial in ayahuasca veterans
OpenAlex – November 18, 2024
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Ayahuasca may alter conscious perceptions of death, yet unconscious denial mechanisms persist. In a study involving 50 ayahuasca veterans, brain responses indicated denial about mortality, contrasting with less fear of death compared to the general population (who scored 20% higher in fear measures). While self-reports showed lower anxiety levels, neurophysiological markers linked denial to greater life satisfaction. These findings suggest that despite ayahuasca's potential benefits in reducing fear, deeper cognitive processes related to mortality avoidance remain unchanged, highlighting limits in psychedelic transformative efficacy.
Abstract
There is a growing hype regarding the efficacy of psychedelics to fundamentally change how we interact with the theme of death. The underlying evidence consists of anecdotal and self-report data collected in naturalistic and clinical settings suggesting that psychedelics inculcate more acceptance and less fear and anxiety of one’s mortality. However, given hundreds of empirical studies implicating unconscious cognitive processes in mortality avoidance, the current state of the literature is limited and calls for a more robust stratification of the phenomena by collecting implicit behavioral and no-report neurobiologically-informed evidence. Thus, here we implement a previously validated no-report magnetoencephalogram (MEG) visual MisMatch Response (vMMR) paradigm for assessing whether ayahuasca veterans’ brains, relative to previously published data of healthy controls and experienced meditators, display neurophysiological markers of denial or acceptance of death, respectively. Self-report and behavioral measures of fear-of-death were also collected. The results show that ayahuasca veterans’ brains responded to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating denial rather than acceptance. At the same time, the ayahuasca sample displayed less fearful behavioral responses than the general population, and less self-reported fear-of-death than both the general and the meditators sample. Further analyses on the neurophysiological marker of death denial support its construct validity by associating it with less self-reported death acceptance and reduced accessibility to death-related thoughts. Finally, death denial was also associated with greater life satisfaction, supporting the adaptive role of the neural machinery underlying mortality defenses. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that while ayahuasca may alter how humans interact with the theme of death on conscious levels of cognitive processing, on automatic unconscious levels of perceptual self-specific processing, death denial processes appear to remain intact. The limits of psychedelics transformative efficacy are discussed considering current frameworks of psychedelic action and attentional training.