First Evidence For Higher State of Consciousness Found (neurosciencenews.com)

New submitter baalcat quotes a report from Neuroscience News: Neuroscientists observed a sustained increase in neural signal diversity -- a measure of the complexity of brain activity -- of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, compared with when they were in a normal waking state. The diversity of brain signals provides a mathematical index of the level of consciousness. For example, people who are awake have been shown to have more diverse neural activity using this scale than those who are asleep. This, however, is the first study to show brain-signal diversity that is higher than baseline, that is higher than in someone who is simply "awake and aware." Previous studies have tended to focus on lowered states of consciousness, such as sleep, anesthesia, or the so-called "vegetative" state. For the study, Michael Schartner, Dr Adam Barrett and Professor Seth of the Sackler Center reanalyzed data that had previously been collected by Imperial College London and the University of Cardiff in which healthy volunteers were given one of three drugs known to induce a psychedelic state: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD. Using brain imaging technology, they measured the tiny magnetic fields produced in the brain and found that, across all three drugs, this measure of conscious level -- the neural signal diversity -- was reliably higher. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

Comments

More Active Does Not Equal Higher

[rtb61]

A more active state of consciousness does not equal a higher state of consciousness. You can readily come up with another test that would do similar, especially for men. Hook up their junk to electrodes and give them a series of complex questions to answer and each wrong answer generates a shock. I'll bet they reach a more active state of consciousness pretty dang quick, no drugs required, except maybe adrenal and some endorphins for the 'er' discomfort.

In terms of higher human consciousness, you a really talking about consciousness of the group, rather than consciousness of the individual. So appropriate experiments for that would revolve around what some consider very undesirable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... So is more actually going on in groupthink than people are generally aware of and is it actually desirable (only being undesirable with negative thoughts leading to negative outcomes). Groupthink a higher state of consciousness ie shared thought ie a group actively trying to consciously think together, focus their thoughts collectively, rather than just a more active individual thoughts due to physical stimuli ie drugs or electrodes strapped to your junk ;D.