Culture and the plasticity of perception.

Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.

Absorption and spiritual experience: A review of evidence and potential mechanisms.

Some people seem to have a 'talent' for spiritual experience: they readily sense the presence of supernatural beings, receive special messages from God, and report intense feelings of self-transcendence, awe and wonder. Here we review converging strands of evidence to argue that the trait of 'absorption' captures a general proclivity for having spiritual experiences. Participants scoring highly on the Tellegen Absorption Scale report vivid experiences of hearing God's voice during prayer, intense mystical experiences in response to psychedelics or placebo brain-stimulation, and strong feelings of presence and transcendence when confronted with natural beauty, virtual reality, or music. Several mechanisms may help to explain the relationship between absorption and spiritual experience. We suggest that absorption captures an experiential mindset that intensifies inner and outer sensory experience in ways that reflect both prior expectation and novel sensory engagement. It seems to enable that which must be imagined to feel more real.

Differences in voice-hearing experiences of people with psychosis in the U.S.A., India and Ghana: interview-based study.

BACKGROUND: We still know little about whether and how the auditory hallucinations associated with serious psychotic disorder shift across cultural boundaries. AIMS: To compare auditory hallucinations across three different cultures, by means of an interview-based study. METHOD: An anthropologist and several psychiatrists interviewed participants from the USA, India and Ghana, each sample comprising 20 persons who heard voices and met the inclusion criteria of schizophrenia, about their experience of voices. RESULTS: Participants in the U.S.A. were more likely to use diagnostic labels and to report violent commands than those in India and Ghana, who were more likely than the Americans to report rich relationships with their voices and less likely to describe the voices as the sign of a violated mind. CONCLUSIONS: These observations suggest that the voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorder are shaped by local culture. These differences may have clinical implications.

The Understudied Side of Contemplation: Words, Images, and Intentions in a Syncretic Spiritual Practice.

The science of contemplation has focused on mindfulness in a manner quite disproportionate to its use in contemplative traditions. Mindfulness, as understood within the scientific community, is a practice that invites practitioners to disattend to words and images. The practitioner is meant to experience things as they "really are," unfolding here and now in the flux of embodied sensations. Yet the use of words and images, together with intentions, is a far more common contemplative practice. The authors present ethnographic research with a syncretic contemplative tradition, Integral Transformative practice (ITP), which grew out of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s. The authors focus on the practice of "affirmations," in which practitioners seek to actualize spiritual goals by imagining future possibilities. Our ethnographic account invites new avenues for psychological research to illuminate the role of words and images in contemplation.

Diversity Within the Psychotic Continuum.

There has been great interest in the hallucination-like events experienced by the general nonclinical population. Many psychiatric scientists have come to identify these as part of a "psychotic continuum" and have begun to ask what we might learn from these experiences that will enable us to better understand and treat psychosis. While sympathetic to this goal, this paper argues that many of these events in the nonclinical population may be associated with the attention to inner imagery characteristic of much religious practice like unscripted prayer. Many of these hallucination-like events are phenomenologically distinct, culturally salient, and are predicted both by a measure of absorption, which probes for an interest in inner imagery, and by inner sense cultivation practice. These observations suggest that rare, brief, and positive sensory events may not be associated with psychotic vulnerability. They also suggest there may be an absorption-dissociation pathway, with or without trauma, for more frequent hallucinations.

Partial failure: the attempt to deal with uncertainty in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and in anthropology.

The paper identifies and tries to explain a style of argument that can be found in recent psychoanalytic writing and anthropological writing. In particular, it seeks to explain why similar styles of argument (which emphasize narration, interpretation, uncertainty, and the professional's incomplete knowledge of the patient or field subject) are presented in these different fields with such different effect. The paper suggests that these differences might arise from the different moral goals of the disciplines and, specifically, from the differences between a clinical and a non-clinical enterprise.

Social defeat and the culture of chronicity: or, why schizophrenia does so well over there and so badly here.

The history of the way schizophrenia has been conceptualized in American psychiatry has led us to be hesitant to explore the role of social causation in schizophrenia. But there is now good evidence for social impact on the course, outcome, and even origin of schizophrenia, most notably in the better prognosis for schizophrenia in developing countries and in the higher rates of schizophrenia for dark-skinned immigrants to England and the Netherlands. This article proposes that "social defeat" may be one of the social factors that may impact illness experience and uses original ethnographic research to argue that social defeat is a common feature of the social context in which many people diagnosed with schizophrenia in America live today.