Comparing psychedelic and meditation experience reports with natural language processing.

Psychedelic and meditation experiences are both known to be personally meaningful and transformative, but their similarities and differences are unclear. This study used natural language processing to compare open-ended narrative reports from 197 participants about their most meaningful experience facilitated by psychedelics (134 people) or meditation (63 people). The semantic and lexical content of the reports was highly similar, with both groups expressing positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of both positive and negative sentiments, while meditation reports were more neutral. This suggests the two types of experience are generally similar, with emotional intensity as a possible distinguishing factor. Methodological challenges limit conclusions, but the work offers new hypotheses for future research.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used natural language processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.