Melting Asphalt
A menagerie of the mind.
See also: Consciousness: An Outside View, Accepting Deviant Minds, Hallucinated Gods, Neurons Gone Wild
States of consciousness
- Moods and emotions: sadness, fear, surprise, laughter, joy, lust, anxiety, guilt, anger, shame, pride, boredom, and nostalgia
- Drugs: drunk, high, coked-up, focused, mellow, manic, ego-less. We typically think of these states as somehow unnatural, but they work by tweaking the same neurotransmitters that the brain uses every day. "There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain's potential," Sam Harris reminds us. "Whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug... is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it."
- Sleep: dreaming, lucid dreaming, drowsiness, hypnagogia, hypnopompia, the Tetris effect
- Illness: stupor, delirium, lightheadedness, out-of-body experiences
- Trances: battle trance, the zone, possession trances, hypnosis, media-induced (books, TV/movies, video games)
- Voices/dual agency: hallucinated gods, schizophrenia, tulpas, dissociative identity disorder(?)
- Misc: pain, meditation, spiritual experiences, tunnel vision, runner's high, 'flow', déjà-vu, daydreaming, orgasm, speaking in tongues
Not sure if all of the above qualify as "states" of consciousness; they may be mere "effects." (Not even sure what the difference is.)
Weird effects
Synesthesia, ideasthesia, ASMR
Alien hand syndrome, face blindness, blindsight, ...
Split-brain patients
