Author: ulio Fernando Peres 1,2,3*, Alexander Moreira-Almeida 4, Leonardo Caixeta 5, Frederico Leao 3, Andrew Newberg 1,2,6
Affiliation: 1 Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 2 Center for Spirituality and the Mind, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 3 PROSER – Institute of Psychiatry, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 4 Research Center in Spirituality and Health, School of Medicine, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 5 School of Medicine, Universidade Federal de Goias, Goiania, Goias, Brazil, 6 Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Conference/Journal: PLoS ONE
Date published: 2012
Other:
Volume ID: 7 , Issue ID: 11 , Pages: e493360 , Special Notes: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049360 , Word Count: 248
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.