Altered States of Consciousness

Recent research has uncovered that altered states of consciousness are much more common
among those who practice meditation and mindfulness than previously thought. While many individuals report positive and even transformational outcomes, a significant minority experience negative effects that can range from moderate to severe. The findings have been published in the journal Mindfulness.

The popularity of meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and similar practices has surged due to their potential health benefits. However, the experiences and effects of these practices, particularly the altered states of consciousness they can induce, remain underexplored. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital sought to investigate how common these altered states are and their impact on well-being, given the rising number of people engaging in these practices.

To achieve this, they developed a detailed questionnaire in collaboration with a team of experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, meditation, and survey design. The survey was designed to capture the diverse range of experiences associated with these practices and their impact on well-being.     READ MORE...

Where Do Our Minds Go?

After experimenting on a hen, his dog, his goldfish, and himself, dentist William Morton was ready. On Oct. 16, 1846, he hurried to the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical theater for what would be the first successful public test of a general anesthetic.

His concoction of sulfuric ether and oil from an orange (just for the fragrance) knocked a young man unconscious while a surgeon cut a tumor from his neck. To the onlooking students and clinicians, it was like a miracle. 

Some alchemical reaction between the ether and the man’s brain allowed him to slip into a state akin to light sleep, to undergo what should have been a painful surgery with little discomfort, and then to return to himself with only a hazy memory of the experience.

Monitoring patients’ brains still isn’t something that medical boards require.

General anesthesia redefined surgery and medicine, but over a century later it still carries significant risks. Too much sedation can lead to neurocognitive disorders and may even shorten lifespan; too little can lead to traumatic and painful wakefulness during surgery. 

So far, scientists have learned that, generally speaking, anesthetic drugs render people unconscious by altering how parts of the brain communicate. But they still don’t fully understand why. Although anesthesia works primarily on the brain, anesthesiologists do not regularly monitor the brain when they put patients under. 

And it is only in the past decade that neuroscientists interested in altered states of consciousness have begun taking advantage of anesthesia as a research tool. “It’s the central irony,” of anesthesiology, says George Mashour, a University of Michigan neuroanesthesiologist, whose work entails keeping patients unconscious during neurosurgery and providing appropriate pain management.

Mashour is one of a small set of clinicians and scientists trying to change that. They are increasingly bringing the tools of neuroscience into the operating room to track the brain activity of patients, and testing out anesthesia on healthy study participants. 

These pioneers aim to learn how to more safely anesthetize their patients, tailoring the dose to individual patients and adjusting during surgery. They also want to better understand what governs the transitions between states of consciousness and even hope to crack the code of coma.  READ MORE...