5.3: Other Alterations of Consciousness and Unusual

The fact that dreams are often ordinary and dramatize concerns that are important to us when we're not in slumberland implies that they reflect more than random neural impulses generated by the brain stem.

Content analyses of tens of thousands of adult dreams show that many are associated with everyday activities, emotional concerns, and preoccupations.
Dream content is stable over time.
In a journal that a woman kept for more than five decades, six themes were accounted for: eating or thinking of food, the loss of an object, going to the bathroom, being in a small or messy room, and doing something with her mother.
Over 80% of people report recurrent dreams like missing a test.

If the dreams of people with disabili hypothesis that there is continuity ties were different from those of people with no disabilities, this hypothesis would be supported.

The form and content of people's dreams were mirror life circumstances, when they examined the dreams of people who were either deafness-mute or experiences, and that dreams can paraplegic from the time of birth.
Dreams can take on a life of their own, far removed from reality.

There are disagreements among scientists about the role of the brain stem and REM sleep.

Scientists agree that the forebrain plays an important role in dreams.

The neuroscience theory of dreaming is not the same as the activation-synthesis theory of dreaming.

There are myths and realities about hypnotism.

There are other variations on the theme of consciousness.
Out-of-body, near-death, and dejavu experiences are some of the more radical alterations in consciousness.

Hearing voices in the head, seeing ghosts, feeling bugs on the skin, and seeing a scene of splendid beauty are all examples of hallucinatings.

In the absence of external stimuli, hallucinations are realistic perceptual experiences.
Brain scans show that when people report visual hallucinations, their visual cortex becomes active, just as it does when they see a real object.
The link between our perceptual experiences and brain activity is emphasized by the same correspondence for hearing and touch.

There is a misconception that hallucinations only occur in people who are mentally disturbed.

According to surveys, between 10 and 14 percent of college students and people in the general population hallucinate at least once a day.

People float into the water for religious rituals.

People in these societies may go out of their way to hallucinate by using prayer, fasting, and hallucinogenic drugs.

Oxygen and sensory deprivation can bring about visual hallucinations.

Auditory hallucinations can occur when patients wrongly attribute their thoughts to an external source.

There are many similarities between psychotic and well- functioning nonpsychotic individuals.
The voices that psychotic individuals hear are more negative and less controllable.

There is no evidence that consciousness Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences exist outside the body.

After the suspect had been subdued, she found herself back in her body.

About 25 percent of college students and 10 percent of the general population have experienced one or more of them.

In many cases, individuals describe themselves as floating above their bodies, calmly observing themselves from above, implying that our sense of ourselves doesn't need to be locked into our bodies.
In everyday life, people who are prone to OBEs often report other unusual experiences, including vivid dreams, hallucinations, perceptual distortions, and strange body sensations.
Some people experience anorexic headaches when they're using drugs, or under extreme stress, while others experience anorexic headaches when they're using drugs.

A hidden ledge 10 feet above a bed has been compared by laboratory studies to sights and sounds that are present in a given location.

Even though many participants say they can see or hear what's happening at a distant place, their reports are generally inaccurate or a "good guess" when they're accurate.
Positive results have never been replicated when researchers have reported them.

They seem to think that Falsifiability is that way.

Our sense of self is dependent on sensory information.

According to research, when our senses of touch and vision are scrambled, the result is a disruption of our experience of our physical body.
The club drug, known as "Special K", which users often report makes them feel detached from the physical world, and it has been shown to disrupt brain activity that brings about a unified sense of the self and body.
One of the great achievements of the human brain is its ability to integrate sensory information from different pathways into a unified experience.
It can trick us into thinking our physical selves are separate from our bodies when this ability is disrupted.

The case that follows illustrates that not all reports of NDEs follow this exact script.

The tale of a man who was critically injured by a large truck and then observed the accident scene from above his body was reported by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1973.

He saw his family, surrounded by light.

He returned to his body to share his experiences with others after he experienced the family's love.

Approximately 6 to 33 percent of people who have been close to death reportNDEs.

NDEs differ across people and cultures, suggesting they don't provide a genuine glimpse of the afterlife, but are constructed from prevalent beliefs about the hereafter in response to the threat of death.
People from Christian and Buddhist cultures often report the sensation of moving through a tunnel, but native people in North America, the Pacific Islands, and Australia rarely do.

It's tempting to believe that when we die, we'll be taken to the afterlife by our friends or loved ones.

The evidence isn't strong enough to support this claim.

Coming back " into the body" is based on Greyson, 2000 and Moody, 1977.

In one study of brain wave activity in seven critically ill patients, researchers recorded a surge in high frequencies in three of them.

Researchers observed spikes in the brain of rats just before they died.

The researchers suggested that NDEs could be linked to cascades of neurotransmitters that shot up before death.

When your text's author first visited his alma mater, he felt like he'd seen the campus even though he'd never been there before.

More than twothirds of us have experienced at least one episode of deja vu.

cal ed jamais vu, French for "never seen," is a phenomenon that some people experience.

The person says that they feel as though a previously familiar experience suddenly seems unfamiliar.
About a third of col ege students report jamaisvu, which is sometimes seen in neurological disorders, such as amnesia and seizure.

Chris Slane said that the explanation that the dejavu experience is a memory from a past life is unfalsifiable and therefore outside the boundaries of science.

There are more promising clues in the field of biopsychology.

There is an excess of dopamine in the sense of newness and familiarity.

A team of researchers used virtual reality technology to test the hypothesis that when a present experience resembles a seizure, it's because of feelings of familiarity.

The idea guided their research.
It is possible that the sense of familiarity occurs when we don't consciously re connect brain areas that allow organisms to distinguish previous experiences.
Maybe we've driven by a park many times and failed to communicate at times, but our minds processed the fact that we've been there many times before.

Anne Cleary and her colleagues reported higher familiarity ratings and more frequent deja participants with a head-mounted display.

They were immersed in a three-dimensional scene as they watched the new scenes.
The more often participants reported seeing the scenes, the more they could look up or down to see them.
The matching of features from different angles was concluded by the researchers.
When participants can't remember if they saw the previous scene or not, Cleary asked them to view the scene again.

The conclusion may fit with the findings that people who have done something before are more likely to experience a new situation.

The researchers' hypothesis is that when a scene maps in different places, there are many opportunities to encounter similar scenes.
The previous scene fails to research leaves open the question of why certain people come to mind.
When participants viewed a novel scene with elements that were similar to ones seen before, they were prone to repeat themselves.
There are mysteries that remain to scene, such as a bedroom or a bowling alley, but failed to be solved.

A man who was listening to a rock band described a mystical experience in this way.

He imagined seeing the stars in the night sky.
His consciousness began to travel up toward the stars.
Even though he didn't pay attention to the music, he experienced his consciousness expanding at a rapid rate into the universe before returning to his body.

Feelings of unity or oneness with the experiences are difficult to put into words, but often involve a sense of unity or world, a loss of sense of self, and feelings of peace, joy.

Such experiences may have contributed to the formation of world religions.
They have been reported through the ages in association with prayer, meditation, and social isolation.
They differ across faiths.
Christians describe mystical experiences in terms of awe-inspiring merging with God.
Buddhists describe mystical incidents in terms of bliss and peace, rather than worship of a deity.
Each person's mystical experience is probably unique.
35 percent of Americans say they've felt close to a powerful, uplifting spiritual force at least once.

It's difficult to study mystical experiences in the laboratory because they are rare, unpredictable, and often fleeting.

Scientists have begun to investigate their mysteries.
One way to induce mystical experiences is to look at their consequences.
Researchers scanned the brains of 15 Roman Catholic nuns after asking them to close their eyes and relive the most intense mystical occurrence they'd ever experienced.
They were told to relive the most intense state of union with another human.
The "mystical experiences" condition produced distinctive patterns of brain activation compared to the condition in which the nuns sat quietly with eyes closed.
When the nuns relived mystical experiences, at least 12 areas of the brain associated with emotion, perception, and cognitive activity became active.
The researchers may have captured mystical experiences.

It is possible to relive an experience in the laboratory, but it may not be the same as a mystical event.

In the second approach, 36 people with a family history of mental illness were asked to take a hallucinogenic drug called psilocybin and eat it.

At follow-up appointments 14 months later, 58 percent of participants who took the drug reported a mystical experience, which they claimed was one of the most meaningful events of their lives.
More than two-thirds of the participants rated the experience as one of their top five most significant moments and reported increases in life satisfaction.
Participants who took a placebo had lower percentages of mystical and positive experiences.
People who have taken the drug reported an increase in their ability to be open to experience.
There have been reports of long-term improvements in mood and anxiety in patients with advanced cancer, as well as complete tobacco cessation among smokers.

Even with healthy participants screened for mental disorders and under tightly controlled and supportive laboratory conditions, 31 percent of subjects in one study reported negative short-term reactions related to ingestion.

Although negative effects didn't persist beyond the session, they raised concerns about possible long-term and unpredictable negative reactions in some individuals.
Lynn and Evans used hypnotic suggestions to produce reports of mystical experiences for more than 20 percent of participants who were tested in the laboratory with no negative results.
Recent research offers a glimpse of the promise of studying mystical experiences centuries, yet the basic methods for in the laboratory, while reminding us that caution is called for in using hallucinogenic inducing hypnosis have changed little drugs that can induce negative as well as positive emotions.

Hypnotherapy has moved into the mainstream of science and clinical practice.

According to reliable and valid scales, 15 to 20 percent of people pass very few (0-3 out of 12) suggestions, while another 15 to 20 percent pass 9-12 of the suggestions.

There are many advertisements for the effectiveness of hypnotism.

The effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies has been shown to be enhanced by the use of hypnotism.

Have important alternative is not clear.

Public knowledge about hypnotism hasn't kept pace with scientific developments despite the warm embrace of hypnotism by the professional community.

We will first look at six myths presented in the box that follows and correct them with evidence.
We'll look at two theories of how hypnotism works.

The first myth is that hypnotism produces a trance state, the second myth is that hypnotism is a sleeplike state, and the third myth is that hypnotism is a sleeplike state.

James Braid claimed that the hypno Consider a sampling of movies that portray the tized brain produces a condition akin to sleep.

It's so overpowering that normal people can't even remember the Greek word hypno, meaning suicide (The Garden Murders), and the shortened term "hypnosis" is stuck.

Water is helpful in blackmail and people who are hypnotized don't show brain waves similar to those Secret Service.
The people are just as responsive to Hal as they are to Jade Scorpion.

People are so entranced by the guitar to the music of U2 that they are hypnotized.

People in movies lose touch with their surroundings.
Most hypnotized and onstage have nothing to do with a trance state.
In stage shows, people are aware of their surroundings and can even be hypnotized by observing how they respond to imaginative suggestions, which are called hypnotists.

Those who flick away a suggestion.

In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, volunteers who are hypnotized feel compelled to commit an assassination and have landish things because they're under intense pressure to entertain no memory of what happened.

In real life, act like an audience.

I bark like a dog when I snap my fingers.

Simon & Salzberg wrote What's in 1985 and Young & Cooper wrote What's in 1972

In 1976, three young men in California were intent on doing Actual y.

A person responds to six out of twelve suggestions.

After being hidden underground for six hours, the criminals didn't expect their captives to respond to being hypnotized.
The bus driver was hypnotized and suggestions were made about how to catch the criminals.
The license plate numbers from the Hollywood thrillers can't be turned into a mild-mannered pers' car.
The media used the case to make the son famous.

The anecdote doesn't tell us if hypnotism is responsible for myth and fact 2.

Maybe the driver recal ed the event because scientists haven't yet identified any unique physiological states or because people can remember additional details.

Regardless of whether or not they've found evidence that the "hypnotic stare" is a unique hypnotized, they're trying to recal an event a second time.

The media doesn't report the scores of cases in which hypnotists fail to enhance memory, like the case of a Brinks armored car that was robbed in Boston.

Those portrayed in movies were hypnotized.
The researchers were intrigued by the fact that the participant did not show typical auto plate of the car of the president of Harvard University, where the matic eye movements in response to visual stimuli was employed.
The participants in the robbery were low in hypnotizability and confused a car he'd seen ing hypnotism.

The problem in scientific studies is that hypnotism doesn't draw conclusions from the study because it's based on improve memory, so it's questionable whether other highly sug 2010).

The amount of information people would respond to is increased by hypnotism.
The researchers might have remembered, but a lot of it is incorrect.
If she was hypnotized, hypno responses to visual stimuli would be worse.

Contrary to popular belief, people can experience many memories.

The testimony of hypnotized people has been banned in most U.S. states due to concerns that their statements will be inaccurate.

The theories have been based on people's attitudes and beliefs.

The expectations and responsiveness to sociocognitive theory and the dissociation theory have received the most attention.

The idea that hypnotism is a trance state or approach to explaining unique hypnotism state of consciousness is not accepted by the authors.

The way they explain hypnotism is based on a separation between everyday social behaviors.

People's expectations of whether they'll respond to hypnotic suggestions are correlated with how they respond.

It doesn't mean that people's expectations cause them to be susceptible to hypnotism.

Participants were told that people who are hypnotized can resist suggestions, but those who are not can't resist.

Studies show that a training program that increases people's positive beliefs and expectations about hypnotism increases their ability to respond to it.

Half of participants who initially scored at the lowest range of suggestibility were tested at the top range after training.
The idea that hypnotic suggestibility is a stable trait that can't be changed is challenged by these findings.

Alternative planning is carried out without awareness.

He thought that suggestions from the hypnotist would lead to explanations for the findings in a separation between personality functions.

Hilgard had a discovery that helped develop his theory.

A student asked if part of the person could hear during a demonstration of deafness.
Hilgard told the participant that he would be able to talk to the part that could hear if he touched the participant's arm.
When researchers used the Poggendorf Hilgard to place his hand on the participant's arm, he described what people in the illusion were like.

Adult participants are reclassified to 1998 for the hidden observer phenomenon.

The participants pick up on the fact that the instructions used to bring forth the hid Barber, & Spanos, 1972 are more childish.

The hidden observer reports what the instructions say.

Hidden observers were led to experience more pain or less pain if the instructions were changed.
The hidden observer seems to be shaped by what we expect and believe.

According to a revision of Hilgard's dissociation theory, hyp nosis circumvents the ordinary sense of control we exert over our behaviors.

Suggestions bring about responses without a sense of effort or control.
This theory does a good job of describing what people experience during hypnotism and fits nicely with sociocognitive theories that emphasize the unconscious nature of most behaviors both within and apart from the context of hypnotism.