By Jules Evans — 2017
You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger
Read on aeon.co
CLEAR ALL
In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec...
The drug lowers brain barriers, allowing distant regions to talk and thoughts to flow more freely.
It turns out, mystical experiences may stem from the brain letting go of inhibitions, opening a “door of perception,” the researchers found.
In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow became the first academic to write about what he called “peak experiences,” moments of elation that come from pushing ourselves in challenging tasks.
For a long time, research into flow states was subjective—researchers had to rely on people’s self-reported experiences to understand altered states of mind.
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Everywhere we look in business, timetables once measured by calendars can now be clocked by egg timers. So how can we keep up? In a word—and according to an ever-increasing pile of evidence—“flow."
Ganzflicker is known to elicit the experience of anomalous sensory information in the external environment, called pseudo-hallucinations.
In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce the altered state often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow, rhythmic fashion.
The science of ultimate human performance has a bad name–literally. “Flow” is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof.
Couples’ fights in lockdown are often about the unremitting intensity of togetherness. The sooner you de-escalate a fight, the sooner you can begin working on real solutions.