Chapter 13: Altered states of Consciousness

James, at some point, said the following; ‘Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question.’

So how do we define ASCs?

James’s ‘other forms of consciousness’ would now be called ‘altered states of consciousness’ or ASCs – a concept that seems simple but is notoriously difficult to define. I get drunk and so feel and act differently; I recover from depression and wonder how life could ever have felt so unliveable; I feel like a calmer person on the meditation mat. In all these cases, something has obviously changed, but what? As soon as we start to think more deeply about altered states of consciousness, the problems begin.

You can define ASCs;

• Objectively. Taking objective definitions first, we might define ASCs in terms of how they were induced, for example by mind-altering drugs or by hypnosis or progressive relaxation. Then we might label different drug-induced states according to which drug the person took, saying that someone was drunk on alcohol, stoned on cannabis, tripping on LSD, or spaced-out or loved-up on ecstasy. But you cannot say whether the things two people are experiencing are the same or if different factors cause the same ASC.
• Physiologically. Defining ASCs on the basis of physiological and behavioural measurements, such as heart rate, cortical oxygen consumption, ability to walk in a straight line, or expressions of emotion. One problem here is that very few ASCs are associated with unique physiological patterns or with physiological or behavioural changes that map directly onto changes in experience.
• Subjectively. How do you feel? The book doesn’t provide further explanation, so it probably assumes that you understand. A problem is inherent in the whole idea of subjective definitions: they may help us to decide for ourselves whether we are in an ASC, but as soon as we try to tell others, our words become objective behaviour from their point of view.

What is ‘altered’ in an ASC?

‘What is altered in an altered state of consciousness?’ is a strange but interesting question. Optimistically, we might say that ‘consciousness’ has changed. If this is so, studying what is altered should reveal what consciousness itself really is. But this is real hard to study. We do not know how to measure changes in something called consciousness in isolation from changes in perception, memory, or other cognitive-emotional functions, so to study ASCs we must start by studying how these functions have changed. All the definitions given above, as well as comparing ASCs with a normal state, mention a change to ‘mental functioning’. So which kinds of functioning are involved? Some are; attention, perception, imagery and fantasy, inner speech, memory, higher-level thought processes, meaning and significance, time perception, emotional feeling and expression, arousal, self-control, suggestibility, body image, and sense of personal identity. In one way or another, this list probably covers all mental functions, suggesting that ASCs cannot be fully understood without understanding changes to the whole system. Some ASCs involve changes to all these functions, while others primarily involve just one or two, and we shall meet many examples of these in the rest of this chapter. For now, we might pick out just three major variables that often change during ASCs: attention, memory, and arousal.

1. Attention. Attention can change along two main dimensions: direction and focus. First, attention may be directed ‘inwards’ or ‘outwards’. For example, in daydreaming sensory input is largely ignored and attention is focused on trains of thought and imagery. Many methods for inducing ASCs manipulate this dimension either by reducing sensory input, as in meditation or deep relaxation, or by overloading it as in some ritual practices. Secondly, attention may be broadly or narrowly focused. Someone high on marijuana may attend finely to the leaf pattern on the carpet for many minutes at a time. Such a change in attention can seem to profoundly affect subjective states, but the effects cannot be cleanly separated from the associated changes in perception, memory, and emotion. For example, the leaf pattern might look quite different from normal, become of overwhelming significance, bring up long-lost childhood memories, and raise deep emotions – or gales of laughter.
2. Memory. Memory changes occur in many ASCs and are linked with effects on thinking and emotion. For example, many mind-altering drugs reduce short term memory span. This has a debilitating effect on conversation if you cannot remember what you started out to say before you finish the sentence, but it can also create more focused attention on the here-and-now, and even a sense of liberation. Time can seem to speed up, slow down, or change completely, an effect that has long been linked with changes in memory. For example, a doctor experimenting with cannabis more than a century ago noted many effects including a dry mouth, aimless wandering, slurred speech, freedom from worry, and an irresistible tendency to laugh.
3. Arousal. The third general variable is arousal. Some states of meditation are characterised by very low arousal and deep relaxation, and more drastic practices can reduce the metabolic rate so far that little food and oxygen are required. In such a state, trained yogins may stay immobile for long periods and may even be buried alive for days at a time, even though most of us would die in the same circumstances. However, learning to meditate requires great mental effort, and with some methods arousal is increased rather than reduced. At the other extreme are ASCs of the highest arousal, such as religious and ritual frenzies, or speeding on amphetamines. Changes in arousal can affect every aspect of mental functioning.

How do you map states of consciousness?

Imagine a vast multidimensional space in which a person’s current state is defined by hundreds or even thousands of variables. This is just too confusing to work with. To make the task more manageable, we need to answer two main questions Can we simplify the space and use just a few dimensions?  How discrete are the individual SoCs? Is it possible to occupy any position in the multidimensional space, or are possible SoCs separated from each other by areas when no SoC can possibly be located?

Tart described a simple space with two dimensions: irrationality and ability to hallucinate. By plotting a person’s position in this space, he imagined just three major clusters corresponding to the states of dreaming, lucid dreaming, and ordinary consciousness. All other positions in the space cannot be occupied, or are unstable. So you may briefly hover between waking and dreaming, but this state is unstable and rapidly gives way to one of the others. For this reason, Tart refers to the occupied areas as ‘discrete states of consciousness’. To move out of such a region, you have to cross a ‘forbidden zone’ where you cannot stably function or have experiences, until you reach a discretely different experiential space. In other words, you can be here or there, but not in between. Just how many states are discrete like this we do not know: Tart’s scheme was only a limited and quite informal way of starting to map states of consciousness.

A psychological and neurobiological review of ASCs included states experienced spontaneously, stimulated by physical or psychological means, or caused by illness, resulting in a four-dimensional model. The dimensions are activation (low to high arousal), awareness span (a narrow to broad range of ‘contents available to attention and conscious processing’) self-awareness (diminished to heightened), and sensory dynamics (reduced to heightened sensation). The authors present their four dimensions as a first step towards constructing what they call the ‘C-space’: the space of states of consciousness. The counterpart to the C-space is the ‘B-space’: the space of functional brain states. The challenge is to create mappings between the two, whether these are understood as strict one-to-one mappings or as one-to-many or many-to-many mappings. In any case, they argue that with state–space approaches we should only ever expect the locations in both spaces to be ‘blurred’ (determined with limited resolution), meaning the final mappings will always be coarse-grained and probabilistic.

What are drug-induced ASCs?

Psychoactive drugs are all those that have effects on mental functioning or consciousness. They are found in every society, and human beings seem to have a natural appetite for taking. They all work by changing the action of endogenous neurotransmitters or neuromodulators. For example, they may increase a neurotransmitter’s effect by mimicking it, stimulating its release, or blocking its reuptake so that its effects last longer, or may reduce the effects by inhibiting release or blocking its reception in the post-synaptic membrane.

One reason the mind-altering effects of drugs can be so dramatically wide-ranging is that even a single neurotransmitter can be active in many different regions of the brain. By knowing the mode of action of a drug and understanding the system it affects, we should in principle be able to understand precisely why each drug has the effect it does. Psychoactive drugs can be broadly classified into several major groups. All have distinct effects on the brain and on experience.

Category 1: stimulants

Many designer drugs are related to amphetamine, perhaps the best known being methamphetamine, MDMA, or ecstasy.

MDMA in particular has three main effects in the brain: inhibiting serotonin reuptake, and inducing the release of serotonin and dopamine. Serotonin plays a major role in regulating mood and sleep, and dopamine helps mediate reward-motivated behaviour as well as interpretive responses to self, other, and environment. So, not surprisingly, MDMA has a mixture of amphetamine-like and psychedelic effects, including increased energy, enhancement of tactile and other sensations, and feelings of love and empathy, for which it is sometimes referred to as an ‘empathogen’ or ‘entactogen’. The effects, as with so many other psychoactive drugs, are highly dependent on the setting in which it is taken. At parties and clubs, the increased energy makes dancing all night easy, and bombardment with music and light adds to the effects, but MDMA can also be used to enhance intimacy and sex, or solve personal problems. When taken alone, MDMA can create sense of love and union.

Like many amphetamine derivatives, MDMA produces tolerance and is addictive. There is some evidence of long-term damage to the serotonergic system from even moderate use, although the brain may recover with abstention and the long-term effects are not yet fully known. People who use MDMA to explore ASCs or for spiritual purposes tend not to take it frequently or mix it with other drugs and may therefore be less likely to suffer any damage associated with overuse and abuse. And research on MDMA use in therapeutic contexts in fact suggests very promising outcomes for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety.

Category 2: anaesthetics

Most anaesthetics do not produce interesting ASCs and have not been designed to do so either. However, some anaesthetic gases and solvents, such as ether, chloroform, and nitrous oxide, can induce quite profound ASCs. They can have elative effects and thus are also nicknames ‘laughing gasses’.

In particular, ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic, although it is rarely used for anaesthesia in humans because it can induce schizotypal symptoms and terrifying nightmares, as well as possible long-term harm. Its main action is as an NMDA antagonist but among other effects are inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline. Ketamine affects attention, disrupting the deliberate directing of attention rather than the capturing of attention from outside. It also disrupts working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory, with measurable effects lasting for several days. Nevertheless, there is evidence of therapeutic value for schizophrenia, possibly because it reduces activity in brain areas involved in sensory processing and selective attention, and for severe depression, where it seems to decrease functional connectivity between networks such as the DMN and affective and cognitive control networks.

However, as a recreational drug, it is used in sub-anaesthetic doses for its weird psychological effects ranging from peace, euphoria, and vestibular sensations of floating and falling to a dissociated state of derealisation and depersonalisation in which things seem distant, unreal, or inexplicable. When injected, the effects begin within a few minutes and last about half an hour; when eaten, the effect is much slower and longer-lasting, with after-effects lasting several hours.

Ketamine is also used in different settings as a sacred or therapeutic drug. It is then as much a psychedelic as an anaesthetic, used to explore the grand questions of birth, life, and death.

Category 3; Psychedelics

The effects of drugs in this group are so strange and varied that there is no firm agreement even over their name. The book calls them psychedelics, meaning mind-manifesting, but other names are often used. Psychotomimetic means madness-mimicking, but this is inappropriate because although existing psychosis can be aggravated by some of these drugs, few features of psychosis are mimicked by them. They are also called hallucinogenic, although ‘true’ hallucinations – in which the person thinks their hallucinations are real – are rare.

Cannabis (Which the book calls a ‘beautiful plant, wtf) can also be made into a tincture with alcohol or a drink mixed with milk, sugar, and spices, or cooked with butter or other fats in chocolate, cakes, or savoury dishes, as well as being smoked or chewed on. As a recreational drug in the twenty-first century, it is most often smoked in the form of hash mixed with tobacco or burnt alone in special pipes, as oil smoked in electronic cigarettes, or as grass, the dried leaves and buds smoked on their own or with tobacco or dried herbs. As with any drug, smoking makes for rapid absorption into the bloodstream by avoiding enzymes in the digestive system that can break down some constituents, and also allows for easy control over the dose. When eaten, the effect is slower and longer-lasting, and control is more difficult. The main active ingredients are all fat-soluble, and some can remain dissolved in body fat for many days or even weeks after smoking. With its complex and varying mixture of psychoactives, cannabis nicely illustrates the difference between natural psychoactive mixtures, which also include ayahuasca and drugs derived from mushrooms and cacti, and the simpler or starker effects of synthetic psychedelics. When one or more of the active ingredients is isolated, the rich and varied psychological effects are usually lost.

Describing the subjective effects of cannabis is not easy, partly because ‘Most people cannot find the words to explain their sensations’ partly because the effects differ so widely from person to person. Some people become self-conscious, disorientated, and paranoid and are disinclined to repeat their experience, while others experience delight, novelty, insight, or just relaxation and go on to strike up a positive, sometimes lifelong, relationship with the drug. Other effects are;

• Euphoria and relaxation at lower doses
• Fear and paranoia at higher doses
• Enhancement of all the senses
• Enhanced depth perception
• Increased sexual responsiveness and enjoyment
• Slowing of time, widening of space
• A focus on the present
• Synaesthesia (sometimes in high doses)
• Openness to experience increases and some people find a sense of the sacred or divine
• Memory, especially short-term memory, is often felt to be impaired
• Creative thought and personal insight
• Mental fogginess
• Slowed thinking
• Inability to read

Before this turns into an advertisement for drugs, I advise you to pages 357-363. For now, I will give a super short summary of the drugs mentioned;

• Mescaline: Part of a type of tiny cactus. Mescaline makes the world seem fantastic and colourful, which is reflected in the art it has inspired, and contributes to ‘the conviction that this is a view of the essential nature of the universe.
• Psilocybin: It’s the active ingredient of the well known shrooms, 3-4  hours in effect, similar effects to LSD
• DMT: Sometimes called the ‘spirit molecule’, DMT induces vivid visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as bodily distortions and out-of-body experiences.
• Ayahuasca: Traditionally a healing drug, ayahuasca is becoming more popular far away from its original setting, with ‘ayahuasca tourism’ on the increase. One frequent effect is powerful vomiting, giving the drug another of its common names: the ‘vomit drug’. Otherwise, after anything from a few minutes to an hour come a bewildering variety of bodily sensations, transformations, visions, and insights.
• LSD: Synaesthesia, visions, hallucinations, you know the deal. Long-lasting in effects.

Category 4: Meditation

Though still in doubt, some people do refer to the practise of meditation as an ASC in itself.

Some forms of meditation, such as transcendental meditation (TM), do emphasise the importance of achieving altered states, but others do not. In Zen, the aim of practice is not to achieve an ASC or reach any other goal. Rather, meditation itself becomes the task. So does meditation induce ASCs? According to Tart’s subjective definition, it does, because people feel that their mental functioning has been radically altered.

So how about mental illness and ASCs?

The term ASC seems to be vague enough that it can attributed to almost any identifiable shift in experience, including fluctuations in ordinary wakefulness like daydreaming, dreaming, and sleep, which would all be grouped under ‘spontaneously occurring ASCs’. Then there are ASCs induced by extreme environmental conditions like heat and cold, altitude and microgravity, as well as those induced by starvation or orgasm, which are physiologically induced ASCs. Some kinds of illness are capable of inducing ASCs too, including those that cause sleep deprivation or oxygen deprivation, fever, or seizures, while psychologically induced ASCs might range from rhythmic trance to sensory deprivation.

The first point to make about mental illness is that it is never solely mental. All psychological disorders involve feedback loops between thought patterns, emotions and moods, behaviours, and bodily states. The second thing to note is that one of the factors which helps sustain mental ill health is the difference between the nature of experience while ill and when healthy; this can make it hard to remember, imagine, or believe in the reality of a state of consciousness other than the pathological one, which can reduce the motivation to seek help or persist in recovery. But a difference in experience is pretty much an ASC already. But does this mean that we should think of the illness as itself an ASC, or as something which brings about an ASC?

The case of mental illness also raises again that nagging question about the baseline from which ‘alteration’ is made. If any illness can be accompanied by or induce an ASC, health is presumably the baseline. But how do we define that? For the person concerned, the differences between mental illness and health are tangible and life-defining. And for any mental illness there are concrete ways of operationalising the kinds of suffering it involves, for the unwell person and sometimes also for other people. The difficulties come when we try to pin down precise points of transition, in time or in quality of life: where does dieting stop and an eating disorder begin, for instance, or exhaustion shift into chronic fatigue?

So how about ‘states of consciousness’ in general?

We have explored at length the question of whether talking about altered states of consciousness makes sense. To conclude, it is worth asking whether state is the most helpful word to use. It seems obvious what is meant by a state of consciousness, but we should bear in mind that to speak of a state is to assume there must be something which is in that state (or condition). And what is that something? If instead of a thing called consciousness, we imagine a process of attribution after the fact, then there is nothing to be in a state or not in a state. Believing in SoCs is thus only possible if, in theory, you also believe in Dualism or Cartesian monism.

Exercises

13.1 Being a student, chances are high you probably have experienced and ASC at least once. If you haven’t, don’t worry, it’s not going to make you fail your exam, but if you have, think back to that moment. What did you feel, what did you do? Do you recognise it within the things this chapter describes?