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. 2012;7(11):e49360.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049360. Epub 2012 Nov 16.

Neuroimaging during trance state: a contribution to the study of dissociation

Julio Fernando Peres  1 , Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Leonardo Caixeta, Frederico Leao, Andrew Newberg
Affiliations

Neuroimaging during trance state: a contribution to the study of dissociation

Julio Fernando Peres et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

Despite increasing interest in pathological and non-pathological dissociation, few researchers have focused on the spiritual experiences involving dissociative states such as mediumship, in which an individual (the medium) claims to be in communication with, or under the control of, the mind of a deceased person. Our preliminary study investigated psychography - in which allegedly "the spirit writes through the medium's hand" - for potential associations with specific alterations in cerebral activity. We examined ten healthy psychographers - five less expert mediums and five with substantial experience, ranging from 15 to 47 years of automatic writing and 2 to 18 psychographies per month - using single photon emission computed tomography to scan activity as subjects were writing, in both dissociative trance and non-trance states. The complexity of the original written content they produced was analyzed for each individual and for the sample as a whole. The experienced psychographers showed lower levels of activity in the left culmen, left hippocampus, left inferior occipital gyrus, left anterior cingulate, right superior temporal gyrus and right precentral gyrus during psychography compared to their normal (non-trance) writing. The average complexity scores for psychographed content were higher than those for control writing, for both the whole sample and for experienced mediums. The fact that subjects produced complex content in a trance dissociative state suggests they were not merely relaxed, and relaxation seems an unlikely explanation for the underactivation of brain areas specifically related to the cognitive processing being carried out. This finding deserves further investigation both in terms of replication and explanatory hypotheses.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Results from 2×2 Repeated Measures Anova (SPM5) showing mean cluster size (sd) of the main effect of group (EXP: experienced - red vs LEX: less expert - blue) and condition (psychography vs control).
The resulting SPM{F} map testing interaction effect was thresholded at p<0.05 (Z>1.64) and a cluster extent of 100 contiguous voxels.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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Grants and funding

The authors have no support or funding to report.