Altered States of

Backman, S. B., Fiset, P. Plourde, G. (2004). Cholinergic mechanisms mediating anesthetic induced altered states of consciousness. Prog. Brain Res. 145, 197-206. 

Only during the past three decades has scientific study focused on the clinical effects of meditation on health. During the 1960s, it was reported that meditation masters in India could perform extraordinary acts of bodily control when they were in altered states of consciousness. These reports captured... 

Savage, C., Harman, W. and Fadiman, J. (1972) Ipomoeapurpurea, a naturally occurring psychedelic. In. C. Tart (Ed.), Altered States of Consciousness, 2nd. edn.. Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, New York, pp. 452-454. 

Fortunately for the scientist interested in these matters, the attributes of consciousness tend to be organized in a correlated manner, resulting in what are called states. By states we mean syndromes or clusters of attributes. When we speak of altered states of consciousness, we refer to the tendency of consciousness to be at a higher or lower level, to be concerned with external or internally generated data, and to be organized in a linear logical or parallel analogical fashion, and to be more or less affect driven. 

Some scientists are sure that waking is the only state of consciousness worthy of consideration because only in waking do we achieve (1) veridical awareness of the outside world, (2) veridical awareness of our own conscious state, and (3) awareness that we have other awarenesses. Dreaming, then, is an altered state of consciousness, because all three of... 

As far as altered states of consciousness are concerned, it is often the formal aspects that are emphasized to have visions, internal stimuli must become predominant to have intense visions, they must become very predominant, and when visions become intense, they are more likely to become exotic, numinous, or preternatural, and thus to suggest otherworldliness. And so on. To understand the visions of altered states, we had better understand how the form of visual processing is altered at the level of the brain. We have at least an odds on chance of doing this, whereas we have no chance at all of knowing why the visionary brain sees exotic flowers. 

The phrase altered state of consciousness (ASC) took on its current narrow meaning in the psychedelic era of the 1960s. The meaning was centered on the spectacular and exotic visions induced by synthetic drugs like LSD, and was therefore strongly tilted in the direction of psychopharmacology. But consciousness has always been alterable and our present perspective has deep roots in the religious traditions of both Eastern and Western cultures. 

The Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was an imaginative theorist who created psychoanalysis when his dream of a scientific psychology built on the foundation of brain science had to be abandoned. Dreaming was the altered state of consciousness that Freud tried first to explain in psychoanalytic terms. This is because the concepts that became foundational for psychoanalysis via Freud s masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), are the direct intellectual descendents of the key ideas in the failed Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). By equating what he took to be the psychodynamics of dream formation... 

During the first half of the twentieth century, subjective experience— both natural and drug-induced—was declared off limits to psychology. The 1953 discovery of REM sleep opened the door to a reconsideration of dreaming and other naturally altered states of consciousness that occurred in mental illness. This discovery coincided with a rise in amateur experimentation with drugs that altered waking consciousness. 

These findings together suggest that LSD psychosis is a dreamlike state that occurs in waking and that dreaming is an LSD-like state that occurs in sleep. It is in this sense that dreaming is properly regarded as an altered state of consciousness with mechanistic and subjective similarities to the narrowly defined ASCs of the psychedelic era. 

As I started to go down the slope, I was astonished to see the pond water begin to churn and to see the logs stand up on end in an impossible defiance of gravity and several other rules of physical mechanics Of course, the most obvious explanation of this experience—that I was in an altered state of consciousness—never occurred to me. Instead, and this is the resolution I spoke of above, the earth opened up and the pond water and the logs slid through the aperture into the psychedelic cavern that opened my story. It s a limestone cavern, I exclaimed to no one in particular as I ran down to examine its vast and exotic volume. 

Two Models Explain the Altered State of Dreaming Differently... 

How, we wonder, would a PET scan of Aldous Huxley s brain in deep reflection compare with the images collected in outwardly attentive waking, deep sleep, and that most easily obtained altered state of consciousness, REM sleep dreaming My guess is that it would look more like REM than deep sleep or waking. 

Later in this chapter I will assign to them (and their cholinergic colleagues in the laterodorsal tegmental and pedunculopontine nuclei) one of three dimensions in the AIM state space model that I use to integrate the pharmacologically altered states with those that occur naturally. It is of paramount importance to emphasize that the brain uses its own chemical systems to achieve a rich panoply of altered states of consciousness, including some truly psychedelic ones ... 

But we already know that this conviction can be illusory and, indeed, that it normally is illusory when we dream. Because dreaming is an altered state of consciousness typically characterized by the illusion that we are awake and not rarely characterized by seeing the self as a third-person participant, it stands to reason that out-of-body experiences are natural, fully illusory alterations of consciousness. 

When told to most people, alien abduction stories cause winks and laughter whether or not the people know anything about the mind s dependence on the brain and the striking correlation between sleep and altered states of consciousness. Why, they ask, should the aliens visit only at night Why doesn t anyone else ever see them, photograph them, or even capture them Where do the abductees go Why do they come back ... 

Other dissociations are the altered states of consciousness seen in hypnosis and hysteria that have been likened to sleepwalking. The word somnambulism denotes not only sleepwalking per se, it also denotes those hypnotic trance states that impose a kind of sleepiness on susceptible subjects during waking. For Pierre Janet (and for Charcot, Freud, and the rest), this was the very essence of dissociation. The psychoanalytic model ascribed the same repressed libidinal wishes to the hypnotic somnambulist that it found to be the root cause of all dreaming. The fact of the matter is that any coordinated behavior is likely to invite the ascription of motive. If the subject is unconscious or nonconscious, then the motive must be unconscious too. 

How could I have been so stupid for so long All of these patients were older men. All of them were easily aroused from their altered states of consciousness. And all of them gave detailed reports of subjective dreaming that perfectly matched their movements. They could not have been run of the mill somnambulists. It was the neurosurgeon that woke me up because he, like many narcoleptic patients, had his attacks during the daytime, and when he did, he was observably asleep with rapid eye movements but without atonia Another day, another dissociation. By the time we are finished we will have seen them all ... 

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