A double-blind experiment tested whether weak, complex magnetic fields evoke mystical experiences, finding no effect of field exposure on such experiences among 89 participants, though a minority reported spontaneous mystical experiences. Reanalyzing the data, higher religiousness predicted more mystical experiences with a religious quality, but not those without. The experimental setup, including pre-assessments of religiousness and sensory deprivation, may have acted as a prime that activated religious schemas in religious participants.
Inhaling nitrous oxide (N2O) impairs verbal memory recall, especially when sentences are low in semantic context. Among 44 male U.S. Navy corpsmen aged 20–29, those who breathed N2O for 10 minutes made more errors repeating sentences than those who breathed air. Task complexity caused the most errors. Volunteers could partly compensate for variations in syntax and the gas state, but low semantic quality strongly hurt performance. The combination of N2O, low syntax, and low semantic context produced the highest error rate, while air, high syntax, and high semantic context produced the lowest.