The hypnosis technique is currently used in the medical field and influences directly the patient's state of relaxation, perception of the body and its visual imagination. There is evidence to suggest that hypnosis state may help patients to better achieve the task of motor imagination, which is central in rehabilitation protocols after a stroke. However, the hypnosis technique could also alter the activity in motor cortex. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of hypnosis on the EEG (...) signal during a movement or an imagined movement is poorly investigated. In particular, how event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) patterns would be modulated for different motor tasks may provide a better understanding of the potential benefits of hypnosis for stroke rehabilitation. To investigate this purpose, we recorded EEG signals from 23 healthy volunteers who performed real movements and motor imageries in closed eye condition. Our results suggest that the state of hypnosis changes the sensorimotor beta rhythm during the ERD phase but maintains the ERS phase in the mu and beta frequency band suggesting a different activation of the motor cortex in the hypnotized state. (shrink)

Altered state theories of hypnosis posit that a qualitatively distinct state of mental processing, which emerges in those with high hypnotic susceptibility following a hypnotic induction, enables the generation of anomalous experiences in response to specific hypnotic suggestions. If so then such a state should be observable as a discrete pattern of changes to functional connectivity (shared information) between brain regions following a hypnotic induction in high but not low hypnotically susceptible participants. Twenty-eight (...) channel EEG was recorded from 12 high susceptible (highs) and 11 low susceptible (lows) participants with their eyes closed prior to and following a standard hypnotic induction. The EEG was used to provide a measure of functional connectivity using both coherence (COH) and the imaginary component of coherence (iCOH), which is insensitive to the effects of volume conduction. COH and iCOH were calculated between all electrode pairs for the frequency bands: delta (0.1–3.9Hz), theta (4–7.9Hz) alpha (8–12.9Hz), beta1 (13–19.9Hz), beta2 (20–29.9Hz) and gamma (30–45Hz). The results showed that there was an increase in theta iCOH from the pre-hypnosis to hypnosis condition in highs but not lows with a large proportion of significant links being focused on a central-parietal hub. There was also a decrease in beta1 iCOH from the pre-hypnosis to hypnosis condition with a focus on a fronto-central and an occipital hub that was greater in high compared to low susceptibles. There were no significant differences for COH or for spectral band amplitude in any frequency band. The results are interpreted as indicating that the hypnotic induction elicited a qualitative change in the organization of specific control systems within the brain for high as compared to low susceptible participants. This change in the functional organization of neural networks is a plausible indicator of the much theorized “hypnotic-state”. (shrink)

The present study examined the trait-like nature of hypnotic suggestibility by examining the stability of hypnotic responsiveness in a test–retest design in which the procedures were administered either live or by audiotape. Contrary to the idea that hypnotizability is a largely immutable, stable trait, scores on the scale of hypnotic responsiveness decreased significantly at the second session. Measures of subjective experiences and expectancies accounted for a sizable portion of the variance in hypnotic responding, both at initial (...) test and at retest. Participants became disengaged with the hypnotic procedures at retest. Participants who received the hypnotic induction by audiotape did not differ from participants who received it live. The results are consistent with sociocognitive and altered state theories of hypnosis, and underline the important role of subjective experiences in hypnotic responding. (shrink)

As understood by neodissociation and sociocognitive theorists, hypnotic responses are instances of self-deception. Neodissociation theory matches the strict definition of Sackeim and Gur (1978) and sociocognitive theory matches Mele's looser definition. Recent data indicate that many hypnotized individuals deceive themselves into holding conflicting beliefs without dissociating, but others convince themselves that the suggested state of affairs is true without simultaneously holding a contrary belief.

Forming implementation intentions has been consistently shown to be a powerful self-regulatory strategy. As the self-regulation of thoughts is important for the experience of involuntariness in the hypnotic context, investigating the effectiveness of implementation intentions on the suppression of thoughts was the focus of the present study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions . Results showed that participants who received information included in the “Carleton Skill Training Program” and in addition formed implementation intentions improved their (...) class='Hi'>hypnotic responsiveness as compared to all of the other three groups on measures of objective responding and involuntary responding. Thus, in line with the nonstate or cognitive social–psychological view of hypnosis stating that an individual’s hypnotic suggestibility is not dispositional but modifiable, our results suggest that hypnotic responsiveness can be heightened by furnishing hypnotic instructions with ad hoc implementation intentions. (shrink)

In recent decades, the focus in autism research progressively expanded. It presently offers extensive material on sensorimotor disturbances as well as on perceptive-cognitive preferences of people with autism. The present article proposes not only a critical interpretation of the common theoretical framework in autism research but also focuses on certain experiences common to some people with autism and which can be appropriately understood by phenomenology. What I will call “hypnotic experiences” in autism are moments in which some individuals withdraw (...) into intense sensorial and perceptive experiences. Following their examples, I use the term “hypnosis” primarily to describe a trance state in which the individuals become highly alert to and awake for an experience of a totally new kind. Through a close analysis of autobiographical writings from people with autism I defend the idea that the particularity of hypnotic experiences in autism consists in a certain qualitative shift within experience itself: what changes, in the hypnotic moments, is the way a person with autism relates to his/her own bodily experiences. If this qualitative shift is indeed difficult to account for within a reifying and intellectualist research perspective, phenomenology offers a large conceptual framework for understanding it. Phenomenology, and precisely, phenomenological psychopathology, will thus emerge as a major device in accounting for such “hypnotic experiences”. The argument mainly draws on the twofold structure of experience which is traditionally used in phenomenological research: it claims that in hypnotic experience people with autism are inclined to focus on non-reified “sensings”, “perceivings” and “movings”, and thus leave aside the object itself and any intentional reification of it. Finally, I will claim that this restriction to mere non-reified sensings might lead to a completely new conception of self and world. In the hypnotic experiences of autism, neither the subject nor the object come to a full-blown and independent existence. A thorough phenomenological analysis of hypnotic experience in autism therefore also has to face the question of a corresponding ontology of these experiences. (shrink)

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C .We found no significant correlation (...) between any of the attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests.These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance. (shrink)

Research in cognitive neuroscience now considers the state of the brain prior to the task an important aspect of performance. Hypnosis seems to alter the brain state in a way which allows external input to dominate over internal goals. We examine how normal development may illuminate the hypnotic state.

A hypnotic induction produces different patterns of spontaneous experiences across individuals. The magnitude and characteristics of these responses covary moderately with hypnotic suggestibility, but also differ within levels of hypnotic suggestibility. This study sought to identify discrete phenomenological profiles in response to a hypnotic induction and assess whether experiential variability among highly suggestible individuals matches the phenomenological profiles predicted by dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility. Phenomenological state scores indexed in reference to a (...) resting epoch during hypnosis were submitted to a latent profile analysis. The profiles in the derived four-class solution differed in multiple experiential dimensions and hypnotic suggestibility. Highly suggestible individuals were distributed across two classes that exhibited response patterns suggesting an inward attention subtype and a dissociative subtype. These results provide support for dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility and indicate that highly suggestible individuals do not display a uniform response to a hypnotic induction. (shrink)

This chapter examines the states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens or psychedelic drugs in the framework of a general model of altered states of consciousness. According to the general model of ASCs, the content of a state of consciousness is a function of the internal set and external setting, regardless of the catalyst or trigger, which might be a drug, hypnotic induction, shock, rhythmic sounds, music, and so forth. Altered states of consciousness, whether induced by drugs or other (...) means, differ energetically on the dimensions of arousal versus sedation, pleasure versus pain, and expansion versus contraction. It is argued that the classical hallucinogenic or psychedelic drugs are consciousness-expanding and therefore opposite in effect to drugs such as the opiates, alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines, all of which can lead to addicted, fixated, contracted states of consciousness. Drugs, such as the stimulants and depressants in moderate dosages, which affect primarily the dimensions of arousal and pleasure—pain, without significant expansion of consciousness, are referred to as psychoactive. The implications for applications in psychotherapy are also discussed. (shrink)

This article reevaluates the mystical techniques and experiences peculiar to Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah and attempts to offer an alternative approach to their dominant understanding, which largely depends on Moshe Idel’s work. Current scholars of Jewish mysticism have a habit of highlighting the “unique character” of Abulafia’s mystical practices while asserting that they cannot be compared with the induction techniques and the psychophysical phenomena typical of hypnosis. While generally agreeing with the scholars discussed that the hyperactivation of the mind found in (...) Abulafian Kabbalah contrasts sharply with the mental relaxation attained through the mystical practices of other religious traditions, the present study takes issue with the current view of Abulafian Kabbalah’s relation to hypnotic procedures, processes, and states. This work addresses the issues present with the current view and offers a more inclusive model for interpreting Abulafia’s Kabbalah, drawing from psychiatrist Roland Fischer. (shrink)

As an artist I am interested in creative states of consciousness and the direct expression of altered states of consciousness in forms such as musical improvisation and the automatic writings and drawings of the Surrealist Artists. I have been investigating a particular spectrum of altered states characterized by an enhanced experience where out-of-the-ordinary information is accessed or an enhanced ability is realized beyond what would ordinarily be possible. Within this realm we would find the ‘peak performance’ state of athletes (...) and musicians, as well as a state of intellectual inspiration where a complex problem is solved and also the phenomenon of premonition. It is related to the ‘flow state’ as described in Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Mihályi Csíkszentmihályi, 1990) and the experience of the American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce who resolved complex medical ailments when in a self-induced hypnotic trance. Additional examples include Haitian Vodou ritualized possession and all experiences where healing and foretelling of the future takes place through a communion with spirits. It is a broad spectrum that has been described in various ways throughout history and within all cultures. But though the descriptions vary, this spectrum of consciousness shares the common characteristic of accessing extraordinary information or demonstrating extraordinary skill or ability. This article is an attempt to help clarify and define this particular spectrum of consciousness. (shrink)

Closed-loop administration of propofol for the control of hypnosis in anesthesia has evidenced an outperformance when comparing it with manual administration in terms of drug consumption and post-operative recovery of patients. Unlike other systems, the success of this strategy lies on the availability of a feedback variable capable of quantifying the current hypnotic state of the patient. However, the appearance of anomalies during the anesthetic process may result in inaccurate actions of the automatic controller. These anomalies may come (...) from the monitors, the syringe pumps, the actions of the surgeon or even from alterations in patients. This could produce adverse side effects that can affect the patient postoperative and reduce the safety of the patient in the operating room. Then, the use of anomaly detection techniques plays a significant role to avoid this undesirable situations. This work assesses different one-class intelligent techniques to detect anomalies in patients undergoing general anesthesia. Due to the difficulty of obtaining real data from anomaly situations, artificial outliers are generated to check the performance of each classifier. The final model presents successful performance. (shrink)

Although the induction of a hypnotic state does not seem necessary for suggestive modulation of the Stroop effect, this important phenomenon has seemed to be dependent on the subject’s level of hypnotic suggestibility. Raz and Campbell’s study indicates that suggestion can modulate the Stroop effect substantially in very low suggestible subjects, as well as in those who are highly suggestible. This finding casts doubt on the presumed mechanism by which suggestive modulation is brought about. Research aimed at (...) uncovering the means by which low suggestible individuals are able to modulate the Stroop effect would be welcome, as would assessment of this effect in moderately suggestible people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 60-79 [Access article in PDF] The Secret Power of Suggestion Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject Suzanne R. Stewart-Steinberg He experiments one by one with about thirty young men. [...] Almost all of them respond immediately to his power of fascination by turning stiff throughout their bodies; their faces become contracted, terrified, sometimes cadaverous; they are at the mercy of the fascinator and follow his movements (...) like a magnet. [...] There is something pitiful, spasmodic in their features, something macabre in their gestures. [...] Donato has them all in his power, he attracts them in threes, in sixes, ten at a time, simply by rapidly staring into their eyes, even against their firm will and their obstinate efforts to resist his suggestion. [...] Donato, in the process, never speaks: he thinks, he wants and points. [...] —an eyewitness account, L'Italia (1886) Young male bodies that turn stiff despite their efforts to do otherwise—such were the events to be seen on the stage of the Teatro Scribe in Turin in 1886, events performed under the direction of "Donato" (the Belgian-born Alfred d'Hont), the new theatrical magnetizer of crowds. Enrico Morselli, one of Italy's leading psychiatrists of the period,1 assisted and himself succumbed to the fascination of Donato. In his important 1886 study on animal magnetism and hypnotic states, Morelli provided a rather positive portrait of the man. Donato, in his opinion, was not a vulgar man. First soldier, then state employee, journalist, novelist, poet, and finally student and apostle of animal magnetism, Donato had revolutionized hypnotic practice through his discovery of a phenomenon called "fascination." Donato was blessed with uncommon physical strength, quick and insistent eyes, a great agility of movement and much spirit. He had exchanged the magician's cap for the more sober tuxedo—quite appropriately, for he [End Page 60]rejects fluids, rejects the power and transmission of will; nor does he trade in somnambulist lucidity, in sight without eyes, in divination. He does not claim to have special secrets or gifts. Instead he claims that it is his quick and insistent "gaze" that produces a rapid and sudden shock to the nervous system of sensitive individuals. Where there is no "orgasm," he told me—but more accurately he should have said "predisposition"—his method does not work. [Morselli, Il magnetismo animale 281] What was then so revolutionary about Donato's method? Why were the spectacles at the Teatro Scribe perceived to be so radically new? And above all, why, as Morselli claims, did these shows come close to producing a political crisis right at the center of Europe [Magnetismo 271]?James Braid's discovery in 1842 that hypnotic sleep could be induced by the simple fixation on a luminous object had revolutionized magnetic theory and practice. Braid's was to prove an important discovery, for it made possible the shift from the putative supernatural powers of the hypnotist—based on the theory of the transmission of magnetic fluids or electric currents—to an analysis of characteristics thought to inhere in the hypnotized subject him- or herself. The real cause of hypnosis, its very effectivity, was to be found, as Morselli remarks, not in the magnetizer but in his subject [Magnetismo 32]. A rethinking, within the late-nineteenth-century literature on hypnotism, of what drives the subject, of what makes him act appears predicated then on a very peculiar form of interiority, of self-causation within the subject himself. At the end of its historical trajectory this rethinking would first result in the idea of auto-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, and then, by the beginning of the new century, it would found the psychoanalytic subject, traversed as he is by conflicting desires and topographically split between ego and superego. In both instances, however, obedience is exacted as a result of an internalized command and—and here lies the peculiarity and utter novelty of this subject—for that reason the subject ceases to be master of his own house.In the remarks that follow, I will leave aside Freud's own contributions... (shrink)

We administered suggestions to see a gray-scale pattern as colored and a colored pattern in shades of gray to 30 high suggestible and eight low suggestible students. The suggestions were administered twice, once following the induction of hypnosis and once without an induction. Besides rating the degree of color they saw in the stimuli differently, participants also rated their states of consciousness as normal, relaxed, hypnotized, or deeply hypnotized. Reports of being hypnotized were limited to highly suggestible participants and only (...) after the hypnotic induction had been administered. Reports of altered color perception were also limited to high suggestibles, but were roughly comparable regardless of whether hypnosis had been induced. These data indicate that suggestible individuals do not slip into a hypnotic state when given imaginative suggestions without the induction of hypnosis, but nevertheless report experiencing difficult suggestions for profound perceptual alterations that are pheonomenologically similar to what they report in hypnosis. (shrink)

At the time of its publication in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1959, this text by Michel Mourlet constituted a manifesto for the Mac-Mahonists, a group of cinephiles named after the Paris movie theater, the Mac-Mahon, where they would gather, program, and watch films. This short but foundational essay stands as a vibrant defense of the near-ecstatic power of the movies, which Mourlet argues comes from the gaze of the camera and its ability to capture reality directly. For Mourlet, art must (...) be sublime or it is of no interest; it must be intimate and passionate or it is trivial. Great movies set viewers “reeling in a vertigo,” precipitate them into a hypnotic state in which they lose themselves in a transformative experience from which they emerge whole. Praising absorption and fascination, Mourlet decries Brechtian distancing and any distortion of reality for expressive purposes. What makes filmmakers great, he writes in this text, is “the way in which their means of approaching the fundamental themes of the mise-en-scène, organized around the bodily presence of actors in a setting, is or is not capable of fascinating us.”. (shrink)

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (French: Psychologie des Foules; literally: Psychology of Crowds) is a book authored by Gustave Le Bon that was first published in 1895. In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others. Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself (...) - either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. (shrink)

Non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are typically regarded as moral patients rather than moral agents. Let us define these terms as follows: 1) X is a moral patient if and only if X is a legitimate object of moral concern: that is, roughly, X is something whose interests should be taken into account when decisions are made concerning it or which otherwise impact on it. 2) X is a moral agent if and only if X can be morally evaluated–praised or blamed (...) (broadly understood)–for its motives and actions. Nothing in (1) and (2), of course, rules out one and the same individual being both a moral agent and a patient. Most humans are both. The notion of a moral agent is typically run together with that of a moral subject: 3) X is a moral subject if and only if X is, at least sometimes, motivated to act by moral considerations. However, (2) and (3) are not equivalent: the motivation for an action is one thing, the evaluation of the action quite another; indeed evaluation is often of motivation. As a matter of practice these are, for obvious reasons, run together. But motivation and evaluation are conceptually distinct. This is a claim that many will regard with surprise. In effect, the bulk of this paper can be regarded as an attempt to defend this claim as it applies to the case of animals. In this section, I merely offer some preliminary remarks in its defense. Suppose that my wife, worn down by the domestic squalor that goes with two young boys, a very large dog, and a slovenly husband, has me (unknowingly) hypnotized. Now, whenever she utters the word ‘Rosebud’, I experience an uncontrollable desire to mop the floor. This desire is, it seems, a motivational state, one that when combined with relevant cognitive states (the belief that this is a mop, the belief that this is a floor, and so on) will, ceteris paribus, result in a certain sort of behavior on my part. This floor-mopping, however, is not something for which I can be praised or blamed. Ex hypothesi, it is the result of a motivational state that is outside my control.. (shrink)

Hypnosis appears to generate unusual—and sometimes even astonishing—changes in the contents of consciousness. Hypnotic subjects report perceiving things that are not there, they report not perceiving things that are there, and they report unusual alterations in the phenomenology of agency. In addition to apparent alterations in the contents of consciousness, hypnosis also appears to involve alterations in the structure of consciousness. According to many theorists—most notably Hilgard—hypnosis demonstrates that the unity of consciousness is an illusion (Hilgard 1977).

A necessary first step in collaboration between hypnosis research and meditation research is clarification of key concepts. The authors propose that such clarification is best advanced by neurophenomenological investigations that integrate neuroscience methods with phenomenological models based on first-person reports of hypnotic versus meditative experiences. Focusing on absorption, the authors argue that previous treatments of hypnosis and meditation as equivalent are incorrect, but that they can be fruitfully compared when characteristic features of the states described by these concepts are (...) examined. To this end, the authors use the “phenomenological and neurocognitive matrix of mindfulness” (PNM), a multidimensional model recently proposed by Lutz and colleagues. The authors compare focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation with hypnosis across the dimensions of the PNM, using it to interpret empirical research on hypnosis, and to shed light on debates about the role of meta-awareness in hypnosis and the role of suggestion in meditation. (shrink)

Hypnosis appears to generate unusual—and sometimes even astonishing—changes in the contents of consciousness. Hypnotic subjects report perceiving things that are not there, they report not perceiving things that are there, and they report unusual alterations in the phenomenology of agency. In addition to apparent alterations in the contents of consciousness, hypnosis also appears to involve alterations in the structure of consciousness. According to many theorists—most notably Hilgard—hypnosis demonstrates that the unity of consciousness is an illusion (Hilgard 1977).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ImagesAntoni Muntadas (bio)The seven images in this issue are from Gestes, a book by Antoni Muntadas and published by Bookstorming (2003). The complete set of fifty-two portraits were collected from media images of various political figures during the Iraq War. Muntadas emphasizes the gestural movement of the hands, creating a strange and hypnotic choreography.Antoni Muntadas — born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1942 — has lived and worked in (...) New York since 1971.His work addresses social, political, and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor central information or promulgate ideas. He works in various media: photography, video, publications, internet, and multi-media installations.He studied at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales in Barcelona and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. He has taught and directed seminars at the University of California in San Diego, the École des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux and Grenoble, the CAVS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the San Francisco Art Institute, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Cooper Union in New York, and many other institutions.Muntadas has received several prizes and grants including those of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz/Austria, Laser d'Or in Locarno, Switzerland, and the Premi Nacional d'Arts Plastiques de la Generalitat de Catalunya.He created works commissioned by the Centre Nacionale des Arts Plastiques in Paris, the Fonds d'Arts Publiques in Marseille, the Public Art Fund in New York, and has been resident artist and consulting advisor in several research and education centers, including the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, the Banff Center in Canada, Arteleku in San Sebastian, Spain, and the University of Western Sydney in Australia.His works have been exhibited throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta Vl and X in Kassel, the São Paulo Biennal, la Biennale de Lyon et La Havana and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Wexner Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio, le Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, le CAPC de Bordeaux, France, the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.(Cover) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.(Page 10) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.(Page 31) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.(Page 52) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.(Page 74) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.(Page 95)Antoni Muntadas Antoni Muntadas —born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1942 —has lived and worked in New York since 1971.Copyright © 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Lately I've been giving a great deal of thought to the nature of human (and other organic) abilities. In part, this is connected to my recent research into multiple personality and the need to explain, not only the partitioning of abilities and skills among alternate personalities, but also the enhanced levels of functioning that some of them exhibit (and for that matter, the exceptional performances of "nonmultiples" in hypnotic and other sorts of dissociative states). My interest in this topic (...) is also connected to my ongoing study of savants and prodigies, who apparently have much to teach us about the limits (and perhaps also the latency) of human abilities. At bottom, I suppose, it connects with my general and longstanding concern with problems of psychological explanation, particularly in light of the gross inadequacies of trendy computational theories of the mind. (shrink)

The conscious feeling of exercising ‘free-will’ is fundamental to our sense of self. However, in some psychopathological conditions actions may be experienced as involuntary or unwilled. We have used suggestion in hypnosis to create the experience of involuntariness in normal participants. We compared a voluntary finger movement, a passive movement and a voluntary movement suggested by hypnosis to be ‘involuntary.’ Hypnosis itself had no effect on the subjective experience of voluntariness associated with willed movements and passive movements or on time (...) estimations of their occurrence. However, subjective time estimates of a hypnotically-suggested, ‘involuntary’ finger movement were more similar to those for passive movements than for voluntary movements. The experience of anomalous control is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the normal conscious experience of a similar act produced intentionally. The experience of anomalous control may be produced either by pathology, or, in our case, by suggestion. (shrink)

In this “Reply” paper, the arguments and experimental findings by Pockett, Pollen, and Haggard et al. are analyzed. It had been shown that a 0.5 s duration of repetitive activations of sensory cortex is required to produce a threshold of sensation. The view that this is due to a facilitatory buildup in excitatory state to finally elicit neuronal firing is shown to be incompatible with several lines of evidence. Objections to the phenomenon of subjective referral backwards in time are (...) also untenable. Haggard, Cartledge, Dafydd, and Oakley report that a self-initiated act can, under hypnotic suggestion, appear to the subject to be “involuntary.” The act under hypnosis is better viewed as one initiated unconsciously, not as an act of conscious will. (shrink)

This paper examines the complex and creative strategies employed in keeping beliefs, memories, and various other mental and bodily states effectively dissociated from normal waking consciousness. First, it examines cases of hypnotic anesthesia and hypnotically induced hallucination, which illustrate: (1) our capacity for generating novel mental contents, (2) our capacity for choosing a plan of action from a wider set of options, and (3) our capacity for monitoring and responding to environmental influences threatening to undermine a dissociative state. (...) These observations are then extended to cases involving dissoci- ated memories of trauma. The strategies needed to maintain a dissociated belief or memory are strikingly similar to those involved in preventing our lies from being exposed. Moreover, these strategies are complex, and they potentially affect seemingly remote aspects of a person’s psychol- ogy. That point is illustrated by examining the dispositional nature of both memory and belief, the complex web of relations between our men- tal states and other elements of our psychology, and the interrelatedness of personality states and human capacities. [Article copies available for a.. (shrink)

Inspired by the 'reflexive monism' of Max Velmans, this paper considers four problems of mind and body. (1) The traditional mind–body problem, including the 'easy' problem of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, and the 'hard' problem of determining just how neural processes generate conscious states. (2) The distinction between automatic (unconscious) and controlled (conscious) processes, raising the question about the relative roles they play in experience, thought, and action, as well as the question of free will. (3) Psychosomatic effects, (...) including the stress–disease connection, placebo effects, and hypnotic suggestion, in which beliefs appear to have consequences for bodily processes outside the nervous system. (4) Whether mind can exist in the absence of a bodily host, as exemplified by spiritualism and parapsychology. As challenging as the easy and hard problems are, psychology can advance as a science of mental life without ever solving them. (shrink)

Time is analyzed as being those processes by which a system notes the processes which comprise its own existence. The directionality of time is given by the concepts, past, present, and future. To understand the meaning of these concepts, a set of experiments was carried out with four male subjects in which areas of time were expanded or ablated by means of post-hypnotic suggestions. These operations were carried out singly or in combination. The data suggest that the present is (...) primarily associated with stimulus input, the past with the criteria for defining that input as well as the development of response inhibitions and the future with the directionality of that input. Marked personality changes which range from the occurence of catatonic-like states to obsessive types of reaction and manic-like reactions are associated with different combinations of time alterations. Some of the changes are in accord with the serialist position on time of J. W. Dunne. The concept of death is very important both with regard to one’s view of time and how one lives. While it is important to live in the present, the present has no meaning without at least a past or a future. Implications of these findings for psychopathology in general and schizophrenia in particular are considered. (shrink)

A form of self-deception exists that is both intentional and common. In it, people act as if they are undergoing a certain state of mind as a tactic for experiencing the state. This kind of self- deception can be illustrated by what happens to players of simulation games. Someone playing a pilot in a flight simulator game, for example, comes to experience aspects of the world of a pilot. Research on hypnotic responding is used to illustrate the (...) nature and effectiveness of such a strategy of self-deception. (shrink)

Participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility were tested on a temporal order judgement task, both with and without hypnosis. Judgements were made of the order of presentation of light flashes appearing in first one hemi-field then the other. There were differences in the inter-stimulus intervals required accurately to report the order, depending upon which hemi-field led. This asymmetry was most marked in hypnotically susceptible participants and reversed when they were hypnotised. This implies not only that brain activity changes (...) in hypnosis, but also that there is a difference in brain function between people of low and high hypnotic susceptibility. The latter exhibited a faster-acting left hemisphere in the waking state, but faster right when hypnotised. (shrink)

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but what is important to the law is what is done with the workspace content rather than the content (...) itself. This makes executive processes more important to the law than consciousness, since they are responsible for channeling conscious decision-making into intentions and actions, or inhibiting action.We provide a summary of the current state of our knowledge about executive processes, which consists primarily of information about which portions of the prefrontal lobes perform which executive processes. Then we describe several examples in which legal principles can be understood as tacitly singling out executive processes, including principles regarding defendants’ intentions or plans to commit crimes and their awareness that certain facts are the case, as well as excusatory principles which result in lesser responsibility for those who are juveniles, mentally ill, sleepwalking, hypnotized, or who suffer from psychopathy. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Le discours managérial constitue un véritable genre et représente une catégorie particulière au sein des énoncés performatifs. L’objectif annoncé de présentation des orientations stratégiques et de dynamisation des équipes s’accompagne d’une mise en scène particulière qui constitue une des conditions de sa félicité, de son accomplissement. Le contexte d’internationalisation et d’interdépendance dans lequel se déroule l’activité des entreprises renforce la stéréotypie de ce langage qui mobilise un format, un vocabulaire et une syntaxe particulière marqués par l’anglicisme et l’asyncticité. Destiné à (...) unifier et à galvaniser les équipes, ce langage est porteur de signes de pouvoir et de distinction, il exclut plus qu’il n’inclut, génère la perplexité et le désarroi et s’inscrit dans une stratégie du flou qui semble être le seul mode contemporain de l’avenir économique. Circulant à l’envi dans la communauté internationale et de la finance qu’il unifie à sa manière, il a une force incantatoire sur la scène financière et médiatique mais un impact paradoxal sur le travail quotidien des hommes et des femmes. Langage de la spéculation et de l’anticipation, il est plus proche des discours de la performance que des énoncés performatifs.Managerial language is a genre in itself and makes up a particular category of performative speech. The stated objective when presenting strategic goals or team building strategies is always dressed up in a particular way that will determine its aptness and success. The context of internationalisation and interdependence in which business activities take place reinforces a stereotype of management-speak, based on a particular format, vocabulary and grammar permeated by anglicisms and lack of syntax. Aimed at unifying and galvanising business teams, « corpu-speak » conveys a sense of power and distinctiveness, suggests exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness, generates bewilderment and anxiety and is very much at one with the strategy of obfuscation that seems to be the sole contemporary register where the economic future is concerned. Circulating freely within the international and finance community and uniting it as it goes, it acts with the hypnotic effect of incantation on the financial and media scene but has a paradoxical impact on the daily working lives of men and women. As the language of speculation and anticipation, it is more akin to performance discourse than to performative speech. (shrink)

This study, conducted by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE), represents the first comprehensive investigation on individuals (N = 3,256) who have reported to have had various forms of contact experience (CE) with a non-human intelligent being (NHI) associated with or without an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP). Our research methodology utilized two comprehensive quantitative surveys totaling 554 questions administered in subjects with reported non-hypnotic memory recall of their CE. This survey addressed a (...) diverse range of physical, psychological, perceptual, and paranormal aspects of reported non-hypnotic based recall of both physical and/or non-physical interactions with a NHI being. The results revealed complex reported CEs that involve both physical and non-physical (psychological outcomes, non-ordinary states of consciousness, and paranormal experiences) events. What may be the most significant aspect of the interim results is that approximately 70% (N=2,279) of the study population claimed that their CE changed their life in a “positive way.” In contrast, only 15-20% reported a “negative” impact from their CE. Further, the majority of subjects did not report events typically associated with the traditional held beliefs regarding the “alien-abduction” phenomena. That is, the results suggest that the reported CE with NHI is largely non-physical and can occur via telepathy, during an out-of body experience, being floated into a "matrix-like" reality, as well as through physical interaction on board a craft. Consequently, the results suggest that a non-physical (“contactee”) CE is distinctly different than the physical (“abduction”) CE and should be studied as separate but interrelated anomalous events. In fact, the CE associated with a UAP is not the predominant form of CE and that sighting a UAP is not necessarily associated with a CE. Consequently, future studies should not focus exclusively on the analysis of UAP sightings and traces alone which, based on decades of research, have not advanced our understanding of the possible force which governs and regulates this complex phenomenon. This is an important consideration since the FREE study dispels the notion that contact with NHI beings must always entail either a physical abduction or a landed craft with beings interacting with humans. This study may serve as a needed foundation for researchers to build upon for validation purposes to better understand a unique and diverse range of reported physical and non-physical type CEs with a NHI associated with or without a UAP. (shrink)

Research by Raz and his associates has repeatedly found that suggestions for hypnotic agnosia, administered to highly hypnotizable subjects, reduce or even eliminate Stroop interference. The present paper sought unsuccessfully to extend these findings to negative priming in the Stroop task. Nevertheless, the reduction of Stroop interference has broad theoretical implications, both for our understanding of automaticity and for the prospect of de-automatizing cognition in meditation and other altered states of consciousness.

This article examines the neurobiological basis of the healing power attributed to shamanic practices in the Andes and Brazil in light of the pharmacology of neurotransmitters and the new technological explorations of brain functioning. The psychotropic plants used in shamanic psychiatric cures interfere selectively with the intrinsic neuromediators of the brain. Mainly they may alter: (1) the neuroendocrine functioning through the adrenergic system by controlling stressful conditions, (2) the dopaminergic system in incentive learning and emotions incorporation, (3) the serotoninergic system (...) in modulating behaviors, and mood, and (4) basic functions implied in anxiety or depression. PET scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of hypnotic trance and altered states of consciousness may provide a useful model for the neurophysiological phenomena of shamanic drum-and-dance trance. The reorganization of cortical areas and the direct interconnections between the prefrontal cortex and the dopaminergic reward centers in the limbic system are of particular significance for human social judgment and symbolic processing. Those centers—including the hypothalamus and the amygdala (associated with psychosomatic equilibrium, memory, and emotion) are enhanced. This arousal may be amplified in order to induce a cathartic crisis—the shamanic trance. It is suggested that through this holistic approach the shaman empirically interferes in neurobiological dysfunctions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:120 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Opera theologica quae latine edidit, 3 vols. (Roterodami, 1651-1660). His religious polemics with Amyrault and Grofius were famous. Paul Dibon, professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, is the most prominent contemporary historian of seventeenth-century Dutch philosophy and intellectual life; he is perfectly aware of the fact that genuine history can only be founded on solid erudition, and this inventory is a first-class contribution (...) to it. Only those who ignore the difficulties of this kind of research will underestimate the enormous effort it involves--an effort which is, much more than a pedantic and mechanical listing of data, a kind of venatio, requiring a continuous alertness, a surprising amount of imagination and intelligence, a painstaking precision, and an enormous background of knowledge. The letters are arranged in chronological order (with the exception of a few which are undated). Each entry lists the date, the names and locations of the sender and addressee, and the opening words of the letter. The status of the letter (original/ minute/copy/printed) is indicated, as is the library in which the letter is located (and the call number), and/or, if the letter was published, the printed source. Thirty-two libraries were explored. GIORGIO TONELLI State University o/ New York at Binghamton Introduction to Newton's Principia. By I. Bernard Cohen. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Pp. xxx+380. $30.00) Over the past dozen years or so Newtonian scholarship has burgeoned as never before, and a first and fundamental result has been the publication of more and more of the wealth of manuscript material and letters that Newton left as a legacy of potential insight and confusion to future scholars. To date, the most imposing of the undertakings in publication have been The Correspondence (1959- ), begun under the editorship of H. W. Turnbull and continued more recently under that of J. F. Scott, and the Mathematical Papers (1967- ), started and continuing under the editorship of D. T. Whiteside. Selected documents of importance have been published by I. Bernard Cohen, assisted by Robert E. Schofield, in Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy... (1958), by A. R. Hall and Marie Boas Hall in Unpublished Scientific Papers o/ Isaac Newton (1962), and by J. W. Herivel in The Background of Newton's Principia (1965); additional documentary material has appeared in studies by Alexandre Koyr6, I. Bernard Cohen, Johannes A. Lohne, D. T. Whiteside, Richard S. Wesffall, J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, and still others--a full bibliography would run to considerable length. Nor, although the uncertainties in the interpretation of the documents are sometimes overwhelming, has this spate of publication merely served to replace one set of scholarly puzzles by another. The traditional, monolithic and impenetrable image of Newton "with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone..." has lost something of its hypnotic hold, and we begin to discern some of the steps, not to say jogs and leaps, in Newton's actual journey of thought and discovery. The volume here under review introduces another major enterprise in Newtonian scholarship, a "variorum" edition of the Principia. The edition itself, which has yet to appear, will consist primarily of a facsimile reproduction of the third edition (1726)-the last edition that Newton himself supervised----collated line by line with the variant readings in the two prior editions and in a manuscript of the first edition, and with the BOOK REVIEWS 121 corrections, improvements, and additions that Newton entered into copies of the first and second editions. This textual part of the edition was delivered to the press in 1966; additional parts are in various stages of preparation. There is to be a Commentary dealing with the prefaces, definitions, laws of motion, and the first three sections of Book I and most of Book III, along with English versions and modern analytical paraphrases of the sections dealt with, a glossary, and a number of short essays on such topics as the astronomical and physical data used by Newton, the mathematical background to the understanding of the Principia, and the analysis of... (shrink)