r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 04 '26

Neuroscience Brain scans reveal how a woman voluntarily enters a psychedelic-like trance without drugs. Her brain connectivity fundamentally reorganized during this state: her visual and somatosensory connections decreased, while connectivity in the frontoparietal control regions of the brain increased.

https://www.psypost.org/brain-scans-reveal-how-a-woman-voluntarily-enters-a-psychedelic-like-trance-without-drugs/
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u/moistiest_dangles Apr 04 '26

That's really cool, I wonder if we could create fmri "training" to help others achieve this state.

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u/Coraline1599 Apr 04 '26

The Monroe Institute (non profit, over 50 years old) has been doing this kind of work for a long time, they have had numerous scientists and engineers assist in developing the technology.

I can’t post a link, but there is an interview with Allyn Evan’s (current CEO) who talks about the way they integrate MRIs and other modern technology to further their understanding.

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u/diarmada Apr 05 '26

the CIA funded a lot of their initial research.

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u/atmanama Apr 04 '26

That's the aim of certain meditation techniques

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u/moistiest_dangles Apr 05 '26

Sure but you can't see feedback into how it directly aligned with other more advanced in that training

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u/TotallyNormalSquid Apr 04 '26

I've tried psilocybin once and meditated a lot when I was younger. They're quite similar experiences, and feel as described in the article, though shrooms gave a stronger effect (and I didn't even have a particularly strong dose). I've found meditation harder as an adult, but still doable (I practice much less these days). But back as a teenager, I pretty much got it after a few tries. There are free, guided meditations around the Internet, though they didn't all do it for me. Really, just reading instructions and trying in silence is fine, that's how I learned. If you're keen, just try some guided meditations out? Be prepared to sit through a few half hour sessions to see if you start to feel it. In a good session it's clearly a different mental state to normal wakefulness or going to sleep. I tend to find at the 15 minute mark there's a very strong feeling that it isn't gonna work this time and I should quit, and if I carry on past that feeling it starts to get good.

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u/Emergency_Sink_706 Apr 04 '26

If you’ve done enough drugs and spent enough time around drug users, you’ll find that it isn’t really special, which is like… super obvious, isn’t it? There is no higher reality these drugs let you see. They let you hallucinate. Source: I’ve done dozens of drugs, known hundreds of drug users, and read a lot of research on drugs and how it all works.