Likewise, performers of Kavadi, a high-ordeal ritual within the Hindu Thaipusam festival, showed increases in pro-social behavior after the ritual. Fire-walkers, for example, showed physiological synchrony with related observers, autobiographical memory deficits, and increases in happiness from before to after the ritual. Prior research has identified a number of effects of performing extreme rituals. Sagarin received a $5,000 grant from Butchmanns, Inc that helped fund this research.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Įxtreme rituals (e.g., body-piercing, fire-walking) have been documented historically and are widely practiced today. Klement received a $1,000 grant from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality that helped fund this research. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The Dance of Souls data set is available on the Open Science Framework ( ) and on the Science of BDSM website ( ).įunding: Kathryn R. Received: Accepted: MaPublished: May 13, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Lee et al. PLoS ONE 11(5):Įditor: Alex Mesoudi, University of Exeter, UNITED KINGDOM (2016) Altered States of Consciousness during an Extreme Ritual. Overall, the ritual appeared to induce different physiological effects but similar psychological effects in focal ritual participants (i.e., pierced dancers) and in participants adopting other roles.Ĭitation: Lee EM, Klement KR, Ambler JK, Loewald T, Comber EM, Hanson SA, et al. Pierced and non-pierced participants showed different physiological reactions, however, with pierced participants showing increases in cortisol and non-pierced participants showing decreases from before to during the ritual. Both pierced and non-pierced participants also reported decreases in negative affect and psychological stress and increases in intimacy from before to after the ritual.

Both pierced participants (pierced dancers) and non-pierced participants (piercers, piercing assistants, observers, drummers, and event leaders) showed evidence of altered states aligned with transient hypofrontality (Dietrich, 2003 measured with a Stroop test) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 measured with the Flow State Scale).

Participants also completed measures of positive and negative affect, salivary cortisol (a hormone associated with stress), self-reported stress, sexual arousal, and intimacy. Participants in the “Dance of Souls”, a 3.5-hour event during which participants received temporary piercings with hooks or weights attached to the piercings and danced to music provided by drummers, responded to measures of two altered states of consciousness. Predictionsįor other intermediate ASCs are better supported, and the evidence for mundane ASCs is quite solid.Extreme rituals (body-piercing, fire-walking, etc.) are anecdotally associated with altered states of consciousness-subjective alterations of ordinary mental functioning (Ward, 1984)-but empirical evidence of altered states using both direct and indirect measures during extreme rituals in naturalistic settings is limited. There is some empirical support for the existence of the ultimate ASC, as well as for psi-like phenomena, but the systematic evidence available is far from conclusive. Might be summarized as 'less selfishness and more happiness' these are termed 'mundane ASCs'. Both the theoretical frameworks of contemporary mindfulness meditation and traditional theories predict profound meditation- induced changes that Phenomena, states of deep absorption, and states of bliss, but also highly negative states, as well as a variety of anomalous sensory experiences. The two traditional theories predict the existence of an ultimate altered state of consciousness (ASC) often termed enlightenment or liberation, and the occurrence of other advanced and intermediate ASCs such as psi-like This paper first summarizes the predictions of three representative theoretical approaches: the early Buddhist theory of meditation, the Samkhya/Yoga theory, andĪ theoretical approach based on contemporary Western mindfulness meditation. Theories of meditation predict systematic changes or alterations of consciousness that go along with increased practice.

Altered states of consciousness