maximus otter
Recovering policeman
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According to new research, spiritualist mediums might be more prone to immersive mental activities and unusual auditory experiences early in life.
Dr Adam Powell is the lead researcher in Durham University’s Hearing the Voice project, and is the COFUND junior research fellow in the department of theology and religion. He tells us about his work into spiritualist mediums who say they can hear the dead.
Your work focuses on a quality called ‘absorption’. What exactly is it?
Absorption has to do with a tendency to get lost in your own thoughts, become immersed in mental imagery, or become lost in an altered state of consciousness. It’s been found that high absorption rates predict things like mystical experiences among those who use psychedelics.
So, among a group of people who took MDMA, those who scored higher on absorption would more likely report a mystical experience. And it’s correlated with a lot of things, like measures of dissociation and openness to experiences.
What made you think that absorption might influence spiritualism?
Academics have spent years trying to understand why people have religious experiences. Why do some say, “I heard God’s voice” or “I heard the spirit speak to me”? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has really championed the idea that absorption, and the scale used to measure it, helps identify those who have the most vivid, frequent religious experiences.
We wanted to discover whether clairaudient mediums – mediums who said they had received auditory communications from spirits – have a proclivity for these experiences.
What were your key findings?
We found that spiritualists did score higher on levels of absorption and proneness to auditory hallucinations, compared to a control group.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-some-people-say-they-can-hear-the-dead/
maximus otter
Dr Adam Powell is the lead researcher in Durham University’s Hearing the Voice project, and is the COFUND junior research fellow in the department of theology and religion. He tells us about his work into spiritualist mediums who say they can hear the dead.
Your work focuses on a quality called ‘absorption’. What exactly is it?
Absorption has to do with a tendency to get lost in your own thoughts, become immersed in mental imagery, or become lost in an altered state of consciousness. It’s been found that high absorption rates predict things like mystical experiences among those who use psychedelics.
So, among a group of people who took MDMA, those who scored higher on absorption would more likely report a mystical experience. And it’s correlated with a lot of things, like measures of dissociation and openness to experiences.
What made you think that absorption might influence spiritualism?
Academics have spent years trying to understand why people have religious experiences. Why do some say, “I heard God’s voice” or “I heard the spirit speak to me”? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has really championed the idea that absorption, and the scale used to measure it, helps identify those who have the most vivid, frequent religious experiences.
We wanted to discover whether clairaudient mediums – mediums who said they had received auditory communications from spirits – have a proclivity for these experiences.
What were your key findings?
We found that spiritualists did score higher on levels of absorption and proneness to auditory hallucinations, compared to a control group.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/why-some-people-say-they-can-hear-the-dead/
maximus otter