Brain changes during a shamanic trance: Altered modes of consciousness, hemispheric laterality, and systemic psychobiology
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There have been a number of electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies in “altered” states of consciousness including dissociative conditions, hypnosis, and meditation; however, the nature and clinical significance of trance states remain elusive. Alterations of consciousness that accompany trance can shed light on the brain networks contributing to the experience of autobiographical self; the subjective demarcation of “self” from others and reality at large; and normative vs. pathological domains of self-experience. Shamanic trance is a volitional, self-induced state of consciousness that historically served the purposes of social cohesion and healing interventions in diverse tribal settings. We present the first neurophysiological study of a normal subject, who has received extensive training in the Mongolian shamanic tradition and is capable of self-inducing a trance state without external sensory stimulation. Quantitative EEG mapping and LORETA (low resolution electromagnetic tomography) source imaging indicate that shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) involves a shift from the normally dominant left analytical to the right experiential mode of self-experience, and from the normally dominant anterior prefrontal to the posterior somatosensory mode. These findings have implications for the psychobiology of the normative conscious mode of awareness and neurophysiological processes contributing to dissociative, psychotic, and transpersonal domains of self-experience. They may be used as a foundation to bridge Western and traditional healing techniques.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it