Brain scans reveal how a woman voluntarily enters a psychedelic-like trance without drugs

A neuroimaging study investigated the brain activity of an individual capable of voluntarily entering a transcendental visionary state—a rare, non-ordinary state of consciousness. The researchers found that the participant’s brain connectivity fundamentally reorganized during this state: her visual and somatosensory connections decreased, while connectivity in the frontoparietal control regions of the brain increased. The paper was published in NeuroImage.

Non-ordinary states of consciousness refer to mental states that differ significantly from normal waking awareness in terms of perception, cognition, emotion, and sense of self. These states can arise through various means, including meditation, sensory deprivation, extreme stress, sleep, or the use of psychoactive substances (like psychedelics). They typically involve alterations in time perception, intensified imagery, and a reduced sense of the boundaries between the self and the environment. Some non-ordinary states are considered pathological, while others are culturally valued or deliberately cultivated for spiritual purposes.

One specific type of non-ordinary state of consciousness is the transcendental visionary state. This state is characterized by vivid, often symbolic or archetypal imagery and a strong sense of insight or revelation. Individuals in such states frequently report experiencing a reality that feels more meaningful or “truer” than ordinary perception. These experiences may include visions of entities, landscapes, or abstract patterns, often accompanied by intense emotions such as awe or unity. In many religious and mystical traditions, transcendental visionary states are interpreted as encounters with a higher reality or divine presence.

Studying these states scientifically has historically been challenging. Psychedelics or anesthesia can induce altered states, but they chemically alter the brain, making it difficult to isolate the pure mechanics of the experience from the drug itself. Furthermore, drug-induced states are often chaotic and unpredictable.

Study author Gabriel Della Bella and his colleagues conducted a case study to bypass these limitations. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brain activity of a self-taught participant capable of intentionally entering a transcendental visionary state on command, without drugs. This person was able to reliably reproduce this state across multiple scanning sessions, reporting features akin to those found in psychedelic, hypnotic, and trance states, such as visual imagery, altered embodiment, shifts in time perception, and ego attenuation.

Free daily newsletter

The study participant (referred to as AVP) is a 37-year-old woman, who is also listed as one of the authors of the study due to her extensive introspective reporting. She described experiencing vivid internal imagery, alteration of her body schema, changes in agency, and a deep sense of unity. Crucially, she retained a high degree of voluntary control and temporal stability during the self-induced trance.

“In AVP [the participant], this trajectory [of self-inducing the transcendental visionary state] unfolds spontaneously and reproducibly across sessions: it begins with intricate geometric and luminous imagery and culminates in a lucid, expansive state of unity and serenity… At the time of data collection, she was not involved in the study design, hypothesis formulation, data analysis, or interpretation. She was blinded to the specific aims of the study and participated solely as a volunteer,” the study authors explained.

The participant never received formal training in techniques for inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness. Her practice developed intuitively and independently from early adolescence. At age 24, she experienced a spontaneous visual phenomenon that she later learned to reproduce voluntarily. Over time, she gradually refined this ability through reasoning and introspection. (She also reports stable, lifelong associations between letters, numbers, and colors, consistent with mild grapheme-color synesthesia).

For the study, AVP was interviewed multiple times using micro-phenomenological methods and completed 20 fMRI sessions over a period of five months. To ensure the observed brain changes were unique to the trance state, the researchers also scanned a control group of 10 matched women who were simply instructed to close their eyes and imagine vivid visual scenes.

The results showed a clear, repeatable trajectory. At the beginning of each session (the Baseline phase), the participant entered the scanner in an ordinary mental mode, engaging in everyday thoughts. She then intentionally relaxed, scanning her body, loosening her muscles, and allowing herself to feel progressively lighter. This was followed by a Transition phase that was effortful, unstable, and required active attention.

During the Transition, she reported the emergence of a violet coloration replacing her dark visual field, followed by the gradual appearance of a yellow-violet hexagonal lattice that she perceived as a structured pattern floating “in the air” around her. She emphasized a distinct sense of “double consciousness”: she was fully aware of being in the MRI scanner, but also felt connected to a broader field of experience characterized by serenity, unity, and a reduced fragmentation of time.

After crossing the threshold into the fully developed transcendental visionary state, her experience stabilized. She reported profound calmness, spatial expansion, and attenuated bodily boundaries. She described an “eternal present”—a continuous temporal flow with minimal segmentation. The hexagonal network coupled with rhythmic violet pulses remained the most stable phenomenological motif across all 20 sessions.

The neuroimaging data mirrored these subjective reports. During the Transition phase, brain connectivity became highly variable, indicating a temporary destabilization of her normal network organization. Once she entered the transcendental visionary state, overall connectivity between distinct brain networks decreased broadly. Her visual cortex showed severely reduced coupling with the auditory, sensorimotor, orbitofrontal, thalamic, and cerebellar regions, effectively isolating her visual processing from the outside world and allowing internal imagery to dominate. Similarly, her somatomotor-dorsal brain network disengaged from auditory and language cortices, matching her reports of losing the sensation of her physical body.

However, while sensory networks disconnected, her frontoparietal and salience networks—which govern internal focus, cognitive control, and interoception—showed increased coupling with the precuneus/posterior cingulate and multimodal temporal cortex. This aligns with her subjective reports of sustained inward-directed attention, stable absorption, and remaining fully lucid and in control. Furthermore, her brain activity during the trance shifted toward lower entropy (less random noise) and higher statistical complexity (highly structured, rich patterns) before returning to baseline levels once the session ended.

None of these profound network reorganizations were observed in the control group who simply imagined visual scenes.

“This study demonstrates how a self-induced NOC [non-ordinary state of consciousness] can be characterized as a coherent yet reorganized mode of conscious experience, with reproducible large-scale signatures tightly aligned with a phenomenological sequence,” the study authors concluded.

The study provides an extremely valuable contribution to the understanding of non-ordinary states of consciousness, proving that the human brain can radically reorganize its large-scale networks to create a deeply altered, psychedelic-like reality without any pharmacological intervention.

However, this was an in-depth case study involving only a single participant with a highly unique neurocognitive profile (including her synesthesia). While this is justified by the fact that individuals able to voluntarily enter non-ordinary states of consciousness on command are extremely rare, further studies involving diverse participants are needed to determine which of the observed changes in brain activity are a general feature of such states and which are specific to this one individual.

The paper, “The Neurophenomenology of a Self-Induced Transcendental Visionary State: A Case Study,” was authored by Gabriel Della Bella, Agustina Velez Picatto, Dante Sebastian Galvan Rial, Sebastian Cukier, Gustavo Foa Torres, Magaly Catanzariti, Diego Mateos, Pedro Lamberti, Etzel Cardena, and Pablo Barttfeld.