Harmonizing the mind

Harmonizing the mind: Combining expectancy, brain stimulation and multimedia to produce non-ordinary experiences that foster openness to experience

The personality trait of openness to experience is associated with a host of positive human characteristics including creativity, intelligence, intellectual humility and artistic sensibilities. Intriguingly, openness to experience can be fostered by non-ordinary mystical-like experiences that accompany professionally supervised psychedelic journeys (MacLean et al, 2011). 

In this lecture, Jonathan W. Schooler (University of California Santa Barbara) and Amanda Gregory (Santa Barbara Center for Arts Sciences and Technology) will describe the development of an intervention that will combine sound, visuals, brain stimulation, and expectancies to induce non-ordinary mystical-like experiences without pharmaceuticals. They hypothesize that such states may enhance openness to experience and thereby facilitate enduring changes in assorted human virtues. This lecture will be accompanied by a musical performance that illustrates an initial example of the musical element of this project that will be iteratively refined.

Presenters

Visiting Scholar

Jonathan Schooler

May 3, 2021

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