Mudar idioma: English | Português

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

-Abraham Maslow

               Humanity is surrounded by aspirations that reside in the cradle of human history. A search for its own origin, senses, extrapolation of being.

               Among pilgrimages plunged in questions about self, consciousness is the subject that torments the core of our species. Neuroscience and artificial intelligence fields have begun to scratch the surface of their biological functioning a few decades ago.

               Dr. Anil Seth is one of the most modern neuroscientists and thinkers who are on the journey of discovering science from behind. To him altered states of consciousness alter their own perception of reality. A changeable and invented reality.

               He goes beyond, if a reality is invented, it is hallucinated and in this context we are a biological machine that hallucinates every perception of the real in hierarchical mechanisms of consciousness. In a playful way in TED, he explains in summary the crusade that science makes in search of the mechanisms that works the conscience and how its theory of hallucination fits:

               Altered states of consciousness (altering the mental pattern that leads the individual to experience his consciousness radically in different forms beyond his "normal" patterns [1,2]), different versions of himself, can be clearly noticed in drugs with psychotherapeutic or hallucinogenic effects. In this sense Seth sees an opportunity to study the mechanisms behind the perception of consciousness.

               The psychoactive effects of drugs are a potentially and important tool for the science of consciousness and psychiatry. Knowing it, he establishes a methodology called "hallucinogen machine" [1], a combination of experiments on-screen behavior within virtual reality in conjunction with artificial neural networks to study the participation of visual systems in human hallucination.

               The main purpose is to find conditions that induce altered states of consciousness without the necessity for drugs.

               The image below we see a simulated environment called "Deep Dream" created by an artificial intelligence inspired by the visual functioning of the human brain:

               Seth confirms with this methodology that participants submitted to this experimental condition of visual neurofeedback are induced to altered states of consciousness naturally without the need of psychoactive. It causes magnitudes of sensations and temporal distortions experiences in the hallucination.

               The following image we see the comparisons of some human experiments without effect of altered states of consciousness (control) with the alteration in the methodology "Hallucinogen machine". On the right the comparison of the "hallucinogenic machine" with individuals on psychoactive effect (psilocybin):

               This new line of research, makes us question a lot about the certainties we have as humans about what is real or just an illusion of what we believe to be. A false existentialism, the illusory unitary self where it actually assumes different versions that exist in altered states of consciousness.

               Neuroscience brings us important teachings about our senses that go far beyond the archaic perceptions of sight, hearing, taste and smell. We have more richness, we have for example somatosensory, a perception that allows us to experience sensations in the distinct parts without the body or out of it. We are now exploring the hallucinogenic, how we construct our sensations of reality tied to our states of mind.

References:

[1] Keisuke Suzuki, Anil K. Seth et al , A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology, Keisuke Suzuki, Anil K. Seth et al, Nature Scientific Reports, 2017.

[2] Tart, C. T. Scientific Foundations for The Study of Altered States of Consciousness. Sci. Found. study altered states Conscious, 1972 .