Frontiers in Psychology
July 8, 2020
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
25 citations
Expert texts on Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation describe silence/quietness as a key feature of contentless experiences—states where thoughts, perceptions, and mental images are absent. Using evidence synthesis, 135 expert texts were systematically selected and analyzed. Silence/quietness is closely linked to stillness, absence of concepts, mental activity/noise, thoughts, and disturbance. It may also reflect absence of non-auditory perceptions, mental images, and negative feelings, fitting a conception of complete calm. The texts do not clearly distinguish silence/quietness from other features like stillness. Connections between silence/quietness and other features vary in closeness, revealing fine distinctions and ambiguities that raise new research questions.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 28, 2024
Oliver Robinson, Jules Evans, David Luke et al.
24 citations
After a psychedelic experience, some people face difficulties that last at least a day. An international survey of 608 such individuals found they used a variety of coping strategies. The most common individual strategies were meditation and prayer, followed by self-educational activities like reading and journaling. Social coping most often involved seeking support from friends or family, then from a therapist or coach. Helpful features of social support included feeling heard and accepted, a non-judgmental attitude, and sharing similar experiences. These findings can inform therapeutic interventions and educational resources for those experiencing extended post-psychedelic difficulties.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 23, 2021
Arnfinn Aamodt, André Sevenius Nilsen, Benjamin Thürer et al.
24 citations
Signal diversity in EEG recordings, measured by Lempel-Ziv complexity and other metrics, decreases with deeper non-REM sleep stages, consistent with theories linking consciousness to complex cortical dynamics. However, signal diversity did not significantly differ between dreaming and non-dreaming periods within the same sleep stage. A positive correlation was found between Lempel-Ziv complexity over the posterior cortex and the thought-perceptual quality of dream contents, suggesting that specific aspects of dream experience may relate to local cortical signal diversity.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 17, 2022
Catharina Messell, Lisa Summer, Lars Ole Bonde et al.
22 citations
A new music program, the Copenhagen Music Program, has been developed to accompany the 4–6 hour sessions of medium/high dose psilocybin therapy. The program uses the Guided Imagery and Music framework to choose and sequence music, and the Taxonomy of Therapeutic Music to rate each piece's psychological intensity. Detailed procedural steps and examples are provided to guide others in creating music programs for psychedelic interventions, with the aim that informed music selection can support therapeutic dynamics during the drug's acute effects.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 22, 2019
Caroline di Bernardi Luft, Ιωάννα Ζιώγα, Michael J. Banissy et al.
22 citations
In an artist who experiences vivid visual imagery during meditation, occipital gamma power (30-70 Hz) increased during the deepest meditation stages and was higher during visions than during non-vision periods. Alpha-frequency brain stimulation made her images sharper, shorter, and more frequent, but the sharpened images were too detailed for her art. Gamma and sham stimulation had no effect on imagery content. These findings suggest occipital gamma may be a neural marker of spontaneous visual imagery in experienced meditators.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 12, 2023
Jakub Greń, Filip Tylš, Michał Lasocik et al.
21 citations
Mental health professionals increasingly encounter clients who have had psychedelic experiences, yet graduate training in psychiatry, psychology, and counseling does not prepare them for this work. To address this gap, an international bottom-up project used literature reviews and roundtable discussions to develop comprehensive guidelines for psychedelic integration. The guidelines cover theoretical and practical aspects, including psychedelic effects, a definition of integration, theoretical considerations, a model for organizing integration practice, an overview of current models, and specific interventions from various psychotherapeutic approaches. These guidelines are intended as a resource for any mental health specialist supporting individuals with psychedelic experiences.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 3, 2024
Darius Parvizi-Wayne, Lars Sandved-Smith, Riddhi J. Pitliya et al.
20 citations
Flow is a state of optimal performance experienced across domains like art, athletics, gaming, and writing. Its puzzling features include a reported loss of self-awareness despite skilled agency, and effortlessness despite task complexity. Using the active inference framework—where action and perception minimize variational free energy—the authors propose that flow arises from high precision weighting on expected sensory consequences of action and beliefs about sequential action. This draws the embodied system to exploit pragmatic affordances while restricting counterfactual planning, leading to inhibition of the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher-order self-conceptualization. However, self-awareness is not entirely lost; it remains pre-reflective and bodily.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 7, 2022
Katherine V. Sparks, Christopher Ring
20 citations
A 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, combining generic and rowing-specific practices, increased flow, mindfulness, and rowing performance in rowers, while decreasing conscious motor processing from pre-test to post-test. However, the intervention did not change mindfulness or reinvestment more than the control condition. Participants evaluated the intervention positively. These results provide preliminary evidence that sport-specific mindfulness training can benefit athletes.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 6, 2021
Daniel Meling
20 citations
The enactive approach in cognitive science holds that cognition is sense-making: organisms enact a meaningful world rather than receiving a pre-given one. This sense-making has no fixed, substantial ground; it arises from a dynamic web of relations and is therefore groundless. The article argues that this groundlessness is not merely a theoretical concept but is directly accessible in lived experience. It explores what it means to know groundlessness and how one can come to know it, describing how this knowing fits within enactive theory and can be experienced when certain conditions are met. A reflexive analysis highlights the context-dependency and observer-relativity of these claims.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 25, 2020
Leonor Irarrázaval
20 citations
Phenomenology in psychiatry and psychology is best suited to qualitative research, particularly through phenomenological interviews. This article clarifies what makes an interview phenomenological, why such interviews are conducted with patients, and how they should be performed and analyzed. It argues that merely testing phenomenological hypotheses or concepts does not do justice to patients' involvement. The article also points to the broader scientific paradigm of phenomenology, which holds that reality is mind-dependent, and suggests future directions for research.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 17, 2020
Eric van Lente, Michael Hogan
19 citations
Experienced meditators describe oneness experiences as involving changes in the sense of space (unboundedness), time, identity, wholeness, and flow, with these aspects forming an interrelated system. The study used a collective intelligence method called Interactive Management across five groups to identify and model these perceptions, which were consistent across sessions. Findings suggest that shifts in self-perception during meditation—toward a sense of non-separation from the world—may be a key mechanism linking mindfulness practice to well-being outcomes.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 3, 2023
Daniel Meling, Milan Scheidegger
17 citations
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances whose effects involve changes in biochemistry, brain activity, and subjective experience, but how these levels relate is debated. Two current views are the integration view and the pluralistic view. This article proposes an enactive perspective that re-evaluates the molecule-brain-experience relationship. It applies the concept of autonomy to the causal link between the drug and brain activity, and dynamic co-emergence to the link between brain activity and experience. This enactive view emphasizes interdependence and circular causality across multiple levels, supporting and enriching the pluralistic view by offering a principled account of how layered processes interact. It has implications for understanding causality in psychedelic therapy and research.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 3, 2022
Débora González, Marc Aixalà, Robert A. Neimeyer et al.
15 citations
A woman suffering from complicated grief after her mother's suicide participated in an ayahuasca ceremony followed by Restorative Retelling sessions to process the psychedelic experience. The case report describes how ayahuasca evoked key psychological content related to her loss, and how the adapted Restorative Retelling technique helped integrate that content into autobiographical memory, fostering meaning-making. Evaluations before the ayahuasca experience and after Restorative Retelling suggest reductions in symptoms of complicated grief and general psychopathology. The authors propose that Restorative Retelling can effectively process and integrate psychedelic experiences, though they note limitations of a single case.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 28, 2021
Bernd Brabec de Mori
15 citations
Ayahuasca has become popular among non-Indigenous people outside the Amazon, often promoted as an ancient natural remedy for shamanic healing. However, this neo-shamanic and recreational use differs fundamentally from traditional Indigenous practices and modern medical research. Indigenous use treats ayahuasca as a means to amplify communication with non-human beings in animal, plant, or spirit realms, where efficacy depends on correct interaction with these powers, not the drug itself. Modern medicine focuses on neurochemical processes like MAO inhibition and DMT activity to trigger psychological and somatic responses for treating mental conditions. The author argues an ontological incommensurability exists between Indigenous and medicinal concepts, so one cannot legitimate the other, and the coloniality of appropriating Indigenous practices must be questioned.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 23, 2021
Alexandre Augusto de Deus Pontual, Luís Fernando Tófoli, Carlos Fernando Collares et al.
14 citations
A new questionnaire, the Setting Questionnaire for the Ayahuasca Experience (SQAE), measures the physical and social context in which ayahuasca is consumed. Developed from a literature review, interviews with 19 users, and a survey of 2,994 participants, the scale's structure was tested using exploratory graph analysis and multidimensional item response theory. Six dimensions emerged—Leadership, Decoration, Infrastructure, Comfort, Instruction, and Social—though the original theoretical model fit the data better than the exploratory model. The instrument shows evidence of validity and can support future research on how setting influences the ayahuasca experience, with potential applications for studying psychedelic use more broadly.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 14, 2024
Caspar Montgomery, Timo Torsten Schmidt, Ioanna Amaya
13 citations
Flicker light stimulation (FLS), a non-pharmacological method that induces altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and hallucination-like phenomena, can enhance emotional responses to music. In a study with twenty participants, listening to emotionally evocative music while undergoing FLS significantly increased reported music-evoked emotion, particularly emotions related to “Joyful Activation.” The intensity of the FLS experience correlated with higher levels of emotional arousal. These results suggest that FLS may serve as a method for inducing ASCs and that visual stimulation can interact with music-evoked emotion, paralleling effects seen with classic psychedelics like LSD.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 11, 2023
Hannah Thurgur, Meg J. Spriggs, Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner et al.
13 citations
A framework called Access, Reciprocity and Conduct (ARC) is proposed to build an ethical and equitable infrastructure for psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT). ARC rests on three pillars: ensuring equal access to PAT for those needing mental health treatment, promoting safety for those delivering and receiving therapy, and respecting traditional and spiritual uses of psychedelic medicines. The framework is being developed through a dual-phase co-design approach, first co-creating ethics statements with stakeholders from research, industry, therapy, community, and Indigenous settings, then inviting broader collaborative review. The authors aim to spark dialogue and help organizations and practitioners address complex ethical questions in PAT.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 4, 2022
Zuzanna Rucińska, Thomas Fondelli
11 citations
Metaphors are effective therapeutic tools because they connect to action words, allowing a client's embodiment and agency to be explored within dialog. Drawing on embodied, enactive, and ecological ideas, the authors propose a dialogical-enactive account in which metaphors are used to enact change in systemic collaborative therapy. Rather than requiring explicit performances, metaphoric engagement stays within linguistic dialog as an act of participatory sense-making. Two examples with adolescents illustrate how enacting metaphors in shared communication helps clients connect to action and explore their own agency. Talking is seen as a form of doing, unfolding through embodied interaction.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 29, 2022
Amalia Casas-Mas, Juan Ignacio Pozo, Ignacio Montero
11 citations
Two flamenco guitar apprentices with contrasting learning profiles—reproductive and transformative—were studied to examine how bodily practices and verbal discourse reflect embodied cognition in an oral tradition. The analysis, using the SAPIL system, revealed that flamenco learners show a fusion of verbal, body language, and musical discourse, unlike musically literate cultures. Music is embedded in their family and social life, transcending musical activity itself. The transformative apprentice differed from the reproductive one in active learning processes. Flamenco learning relies on listening and temporary external representations rather than notation, with the body central to holistic rhythm processing through singing, playing, and dancing. The embodied mind is a product of the learning culture, reflected through body and gesture.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 27, 2021
Leor Roseman, Nadeem Karkabi
11 citations
Ayahuasca rituals involving both Israelis and Palestinians can produce feelings of unity, but these feelings may mask a political status quo that marginalizes Palestinians. Interviews and observations of 31 participants revealed that the ritual structure avoided recognizing Palestinian national identity or acknowledging Israeli injustice. However, ayahuasca occasionally triggered revelatory events where individuals confronted the oppressive reality between the groups. These events evoked pain, anger, and guilt, leading to resistance against the hegemonic ritual structure and a desire to deliver an emancipatory message, often through song. This fidelity to the revealed truth sometimes expanded ayahuasca practices to other Palestinians and politicized the practice, illustrating the egalitarian revolutionary potential of psychedelics as analyzed through Badiou's theory.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 28, 2022
Giorgio Marchetti
9 citations
Conscious information processing is distinguished by its phenomenal aspect (PAC), the what-it-is-like for an agent to experience something, which provides a sense of self and informs how the self is affected by the agent's own operations. The PAC originates from attention detecting the state of the self (S), a hierarchy of innate and acquired values expressed via the nervous system that maps the agent's body, cognitive capacities, and environmental interactions. This detection modulates the energy level of the organ of attention (OA), its neural substrate, generating the PAC. The PAC has five dimensions—qualitative, quantitative, hedonic, temporal, and spatial—each traceable to a specific feature of that modulation.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 13, 2020
H. Cassol, E. Bonin, C. Bastin et al.
9 citations
Memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) are recalled with more detail and a stronger sense of reality than memories of other real or imagined events. In a study of 25 people who had lived through an NDE, verbal recollections of the NDE contained more internal/episodic details than flashbulb memories or other autobiographical memories. NDE memories were also the most central to a person's identity, followed by other autobiographical memories, then flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories were associated with lower intensity of feelings during recall, lower personal importance, less reactivation, and a less frequent first-person perspective compared to NDE and control memories. The findings indicate that NDE memories are unique and highly impactful.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 25, 2025
Antonio Metastasio, Elisabeth Prevete, Sofia Venturini et al.
8 citations
People who took psilocybin without other substances reported lasting increases in emotional sensitivity, empathy, and connection to others, along with deeper insights into their lives and values. The experience also led to profound shifts in behavior, attitudes, and interests, suggesting psilocybin can catalyze personal growth. This qualitative study used phenomenological methods to systematically describe the subjective psychedelic experience, aiming to inform its integration into psychotherapy.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 16, 2023
Gina Ratkovic, Mike Sosteric, Tristan Sosteric
8 citations
An Indigenous therapist/psychonaut evaluated the Copenhagen Music Program for Psilocybin during a 3.5 gram psilocybin journey and found that its musical selections evoke colonial and religious contexts and are psychologically and emotionally coercive, designed to steer the experience along a predetermined path. The program is deemed unsuitable for Indigenous travelers. The authors suggest curating a broader range of playlists and incorporating music aligned with traditional shamanic practices as a more appropriate approach to psychedelic therapy.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 10, 2022
L. Lundh
8 citations
Contemplative practices, such as mindfulness and gratitude, are engaged in for the experiences they afford, yet the field of Contemplation Studies lacks agreed definitions. This paper proposes that experimental phenomenology—the investigation of how intentional variations in attention and attitude shape experience—can advance the field. Contemplative practices are a subcategory of phenomenological practices. Two varieties of experimental phenomenology are described: an informal kind that historically generated diverse contemplative traditions and can inform personalized health interventions, and a rigorous scientific kind that systematically tests experiential effects. The latter may uncover general principles and help develop new contemplative practices.