If you’ve had a psychological experience that fundamentally shakes your understanding of reality—such as suddenly hearing voices when no one is around, or feeling physically touched by someone who isn’t visible—you may be in good company. While such experiences have symptoms in common with dissociative disorders or psychosis, and can lead some to worry they have psychiatric illness, they’re surprisingly common in the general population. One in three people report severe alterations of sensory perception, such as seeing objects move on their own, while up to half of the population has experienced feeling touched, feeling guided by a force, or extrasensory perception.
In the long run, such experiences often have a positive impact on a person’s well-being, according to a new study published in PLOS One by a team of researchers from Brazil. Together, they built a list of 38 distinct “extraordinary” experiences, testing their validity with a small sample of participants. Then they surveyed more than 5,000 Brazilians about that list of experiences, cataloguing which ones they had, how they made sense of them, and what impact they had on the person’s mental health. The team chose Brazil as their testing ground in part because it has one of the most diverse cultures in Latin America, in terms of both ethnic and religious traditions, and because many of these traditions incorporate non-ordinary psychological experiences into ritual practice.
One out of five participants said the experience had an immediate negative impact, and one out of four said it caused suffering or discomfort, but just over half said that in the long run the experience helped them to grow or had a positive influence on their life. Most of these experiences happened to people when they were alert and awake, without psychoactive drugs or other mind-altering substances. The study has certain limitations: For instance, no demographic information was collected about the respondents, so it’s hard to know if the sample is representative of the population. Self-report can also result in something called social desirability bias, where participants provide answers they think the researchers want.
I spoke with corresponding author Ronald Fischer, a neuroscientist at the Institute D’Or for Research and Education in São Paulo about what makes falling in love an extraordinary experience, his own moment of dissociation as a young man, and what a person should do if they have one of these experiences and feel shaken by it.
Read more: “My Out-of-Body Experience”
What inspired you to research this question of how humans respond to non-ordinary experiences?
In my work, I’m interested in the complex interaction between culture and mind. A few years ago, we started looking into religion and spirituality a bit more, and I began working within a neuroscience institute that investigates aspects of consciousness.
All these different interests started to converge: questions about how people think about spirituality, what it means for them, how spirituality collides with the kinds of experiences that escape our day-to-day meaning frameworks, and what that can tell us about what consciousness is and how it works.
Then, when the pandemic came around, we started to become very interested in mental health. What we started realizing is that a lot of the inventories that look at these experiences that escape our day-to-day meaning frameworks—like hearing voices, for instance—often already have an evaluation embedded in them. This makes it difficult to distinguish what happened—what you saw, heard, and felt—from the diagnostic interpretation made by a psychiatrist. We wanted to know, can we measure the experience itself, separate it from the interpretation? The paper we just published is an attempt to validate and extend this meaning-making framework.
For the current study, we asked individuals, “Have you had a specific experience?” If they said yes, we provided this long list of contextual factors related to how they tried to make sense of it. And so, we were able to capture the meaning-making process across all 30 of these odd experiences.
What were some of the most common of the extraordinary experiences you were measuring?
I can tell you one thing for sure: Déjà vu, that feeling of strange familiarity, like you’ve been in this situation before, is very common. It probably just indicates some kind of memory lapse, where you have a memory but you misattribute incoming information. If you look into the clinical literature or the cognitive literature, déjà vu may just be a normal process. That’s why I think it’s really interesting from a consciousness perspective, these common failures. Three out of four participants related having had this experience of déjà vu. Love is another one that’s very common.
You rank love as a non-ordinary experience?
Yeah. Like falling in love. This very strong sense of love. I’m already jumping ahead to some research that we’re doing right now. We’re trying to see how stable the effect is. If you’ve never had an experience of love, you’re lonely. If you had it once or twice intensely, that’s healthy. There might be a broken heart, but you’re doing well, typically. If you have it six, seven or more times, it indicates that there’s a bit of a problem. Typically, you don’t do as well.
You must be talking about a very extreme version of love?
The way we ask about love is that it’s this very strong sense of falling in love that stands out. For the emotion questions, we always have this disclaimer: “Think of something that really stood out for you.” For the other experiences, we don’t have that standing-out part. But now, knowing how common déjà vu is, I wonder whether we should have included it there as well. Compassion is another common one. Roughly eight out of 10 participants typically report at least once having had the sense of compassion when somebody’s suffering.
Compassion also seems like a very healthy and hopefully ordinary human experience. What makes it extraordinary?
Again, it’s prefaced with this note about whether the experience really stood out for you. And we ask people to tell us what happened, who was there. Typically, it’s really things that stood out for people where they rethought something that had happened in their lives, an experience that really marked them in some way.
Lucid dreaming is another one, being completely absorbed in something, so much so that you forget about time. Those are the most common ones.
What about the least common extraordinary experiences?
The ones that are least common, that get into more traditional clinical territory, are the out-of-body experiences; the feeling of possession, that somebody is inside your body controlling you; seeing lights suddenly when it’s dark; having a near-death experience.
But the surprising thing for us was that about one in five participants on average reported having at least one of those clinically unusual experiences. That’s where the paper we just published in Plos One comes in. Even considering those more clinically relevant experiences, most people say, “Overall, I’m doing well.” It didn’t affect me negatively. That’s the most thought-provoking finding, because it challenges some of what we see in the psychiatric literature.
Read more: “The Afterlife Is in Our Heads”
How do you explain the discrepancy—that most people tolerate these unusual experiences well?
One explanation could be that psychiatric research focuses primarily on those individuals who see somebody for help when they have those experiences. On the other hand, we also have spiritual and religious literature which often sees those experiences as a blessing. For a lot of people, it’s an immediate challenge to make sense of them, but ultimately, it helps them to grow. So it seems like these experiences don’t automatically lead to suffering.
This is one of the motivations for why we got into this research. When you talk to individuals that have had these experiences, they often relate some kind of stigma. When I give talks these days, often I feel like afterward, I become a therapist, because there are all these people coming up to me going, “I thought I was an odd one because I’ve had these experiences, and now I realize that a lot of people have them.” People were afraid to talk to others about it. I want to help remove a little bit of that stigma and help people make sense of their experiences and understand the mechanism of sense-making.
Have you had one of these experiences yourself?
Déjà vu, for sure. Feeling absorbed, falling in love. I think I’m a pretty normal human being. But I do remember one experience. I was driving a car in winter. I was taking a shortcut through some forested area. All of a sudden—I still remember it vividly—I was like, “Oh my God, where am I? Where am I going? I have no clue,” because everything was white. I got out of the forest, and all you could see was white fields. That was a really scary moment. It’s classic derealization, a mental state where your surroundings feel unreal or dreamlike. I was probably just tired.
Did it force any kind of reconsideration of your life or basic framework?
I think I was too young at that point.
If these experiences are so common in the general population, why do we see them as extraordinary?
Extraordinary is just one label. There are so many different ones: non-ordinary, transcendent, psychotic. There are potentially three different explanations for this. The first one is just that different academic fields that look into these kinds of experiences take their particular lens and use some terminology that seems most appropriate to talk to specific audiences about them.
If you’re a psychiatrist and you look at something like hearing voices or seeing apparitions or ghosts, you have to label it somehow. In the social psych literature, people may think about how this experience connects them to others, so they use the transcendental framing, and so on. Different academic disciplines use different terminology.
The second problem is that there hasn’t been that much research that looks at these experiences in a relatively neutral stance. The clinical literature, which has a lot of information on the more clinical expressions of these experiences, tends to say they’re relatively rare. That’s where the extraordinary framing comes from.
The third explanation is that our team was explicitly interested in experiences that challenge the day-to-day meaning frameworks that people have in the first place. We were looking for experiences that make someone stop and think, “Wow, what just happened? How do I make sense of this?”
Are there any universal elements that these experiences share, from déjà vu to out-of-body experience?
The common thing is that they challenge some kind of day-to-day running of daily functioning. You go through your day, you function normally, and then all of a sudden something happens, and you go, “Oops, what’s going on here?” Some of them really challenge you. Some may just be this little bump in the road, and then you continue.
Are there any that are only found in Brazil?
Part of our research program is interested in so-called mediums, who are able to channel spiritual energy and so on. I’m completely skeptical, but as an ethnographic exercise, I participated in a training course to become a spirit medium. It’s definitely an experience. The more I participated, the more I came to believe that science can explain mediumship through various group mechanisms—emotional contagion, differential sensitivities to the moods of others, and so on.
But are there some unique to Brazil? We don’t 100 percent know yet. With this other paper, we tried to validate some of the experiences that are very common in the ethnographic, anthropological literature in spiritual and religious rituals common in Brazil. These religious systems provide a framework, and incorporate the experiences into some kind of ritual practice.
But variations of them have also been reported in other parts of the world, or in other time periods. If you look into historical records, there were all these kinds of unusual experiences that people reported, for example, in medieval Europe, that disappeared from our record. So all of these experiences tap into some aspects of how our brains and minds work.
And in some contexts, some social, cultural, and economic conditions, they become more salient, or people start noticing them more. And then you have potentially some copy effects—group dynamics that could explain why some of these experiences become more prevalent within a specific setting. My skeptical view would be that most of these experiences can be found in other places, other contexts, and other time periods. It’s just a matter of the specific social-cultural conditions that make them more or less noticeable.
Read more: “The Original Psychotherapists Were Shamans and Priests”
In your paper, you describe two major hypotheses about why these experiences persist. One is neurobiological; the other is cultural. It seems like you’re leaning more toward the cultural explanation?
If it were only biological, given the diversity of experiences in our inventory, we should not see this very clear distribution across the population. It suggests that people have some culturally shared meaning systems that they flexibly use to make sense of all sorts of things, including these little unexpected experiences. So it’s probably both.
We haven’t started looking at the experience-by-experience specifics. We’d certainly expect there’s some variation—both across the experiences and in terms of the individuals who report them.
That’s one of our ongoing projects—trying to understand, for example, if there are individual biological differences in who’s more likely to pathologically keep falling into extreme love versus who’s finding a partner and happily staying for longer periods. Are there certain psychological profiles for specific experiences, but also groups of experiences?
It sounds like there were some surprises in the findings: Psychoactive drugs weren’t involved in the unusual experiences for most people, nor were abnormal perceptual circumstances such as fog or noise. What do you make of these surprises?
My expectation was that people would say, “I was really drunk or really high,” which wasn’t the case. There is, of course, a huge research industry right now around the effects of ayahuasca and other psychoactive substances, their use in therapeutics, and so on. My cheeky response to those folks is, “Maybe you don’t need to take drugs to have those experiences. You could try to induce them in other ways, in therapeutic settings, which is potentially healthier and safer.”
The second prediction I had going into this research was that people would experience these either when falling asleep or waking up. Basically, when they’re not quite awake. This did happen, but it wasn’t that common. It’s really this awake-and-alert state of mind, which is interesting from a consciousness-experience perspective.
Sometimes researchers argue that consciousness is an accurate experience of whatever is going on around us. But maybe consciousness is actually full of bugs. There are all sorts of features that disconnect us from what’s going on in our bodies, from the environment, and that’s part and parcel of what it’s like to be conscious. But sometimes things go wrong, which then calls you back to process some information. That’s something I haven’t been able to fully discuss with colleagues who do this kind of work and tend to perceive consciousness as a flawless form of information processing.
Another interesting finding for me was the fact that a large number of individuals reported having the experience when they were alone. That’s interesting because when you’re alone, you can’t verify what you experienced. You have to trust your senses somehow. If you hear a voice, you could say, “Did you hear that?” But when you’re alone, you can’t ask somebody else what just happened.
On the other side, my expectation going into this research was that people might report more of those experiences in a context with a lot of noise, smoke, and darkness, where you can’t really perceive well what’s going on. This would make the most sense from the perspective of predictive coding, a theory of brain function that suggests your brain is constantly guessing what will happen next based on prior experience and then comparing that guess against sensory input. In smoke or darkness, your priors are basically compensating for the lack of clarity coming in.
This is what we see in instances of so-called possession in some Southeast Asian rituals—where there’s sensory overload, a lot of smoke, and low light settings at dark or dawn. You often can’t make out what’s going on around you or with your body, which makes sense that possession-like states are more likely to occur. But only about 2 percent of the sample reported being in a situation that was unclear in that sense.
Based on the meditation literature, I was also expecting more reports of being in nature or in a forest. But no. We live in a very urban environment these days. How many times do you actually go out into nature? But still, that was another surprise for me.
Which kinds of appraisals are associated with the best outcomes—whether religious, spiritual, paranormal, or even pathological?
We just submitted another paper where we looked at some of those experiences specifically—those of more interest to psychiatrists. If people were spiritual or religious and made sense of those experiences through that lens, they tended to report better outcomes. But it’s all self-reported.
That brings me to another point, because I was talking about the stigma. If you have an experience you’re not sure about and it seems to bother you—either it interferes with whatever you’re doing at that moment, or you have challenges making sense of it—it’s important to talk to somebody. And if it really bothers you, you should also seek help. In a literature review, we observed that sometimes people may interpret something as spiritual or religious, when it’s actually a symptom, a warning of, say, cancer, which can increase, for example, hallucinations, both auditory or visual. If it’s happening more frequently, if it interferes with what you’re doing, seek help.
We also encourage people to talk to others. If somebody comes and talks to you, just listen, keep an open mind, and don’t jump to conclusions. Help them make sense of it. If you think they need help, work with them to find something that works for them.
But it’s this kind of tightrope, because it could potentially be something. For most people, most of the time, it’s completely harmless. So we want to de-stigmatize the experience, but we also don’t want to belittle it, because sometimes it can be something somebody needs to look at more carefully. 
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