Citizen-science altered-state survey
Altered Xperience Project
The Altered Xperience Project (AXP) is a CIRCE-led citizen-science survey for anonymous reports of altered states of consciousness, including substance-based and non-substance-based experiences. The public survey combines multilingual questionnaires, feedback, privacy boundaries, scoring, research exports, and collaborator workflow. CIRCE leads the scientific project; Mesmer Prism contributes the web infrastructure and collaborator tooling.
Direction
What the system adds
AXP turns altered-state research into a running citizen-science survey. Public participation, questionnaire design, data hygiene, and open-science distribution have to work together in the same web system.
The running app is a Shiny survey pipeline with Google Sheets questionnaire definitions, language-specific survey blocks, MariaDB persistence, canonical ASC scoring, peer-comparison feedback, data-quality metadata, and export scripts for redacted public exports and restricted research exports. The access guide explains survey links, questionnaire edits, data examples, peer-plot tuning, and the contracts that keep edits safe.
AXP extends the same systems thinking behind Viscereality and Rusty XR into browser-based research infrastructure: consent-facing flow, participant experience, reproducible definitions, redacted exports, and collaborator documentation.
Current system
- Multilingual Shiny survey flow for altered-state reports
- Questionnaire definitions loaded from Google Sheets or local CSV sources
- ASC scoring, feedback screens, and peer-comparison plotting
- MariaDB persistence and one-fact-per-key data tables
- Redacted public exports, restricted full exports, and OSF-ready data packages
- Collaborator-facing access guide, diagrams, data examples, and plot lab
Connected projects
- Brain Candy for non-pharmacological state-shift design and measurement context
- Prophantasia for citizen-science platform thinking around imagery variation
- Phenomenological Control for suggestion, imagery, and subjective-report discipline
- Viscereality for live study systems and participant-facing XR research flow
Scope
Role and system scope
CIRCE leads the scientific project and remains the scientific source of record. Mesmer Prism translates research requirements into working survey, data, feedback, and documentation systems.
AXP collects subjective reports. That makes privacy, anonymity, stable terminology, and export boundaries central design concerns. The tooling therefore treats participant-facing experience, researcher-facing data shape, and collaborator documentation as one system instead of separate afterthoughts.
AXP is an open-science and citizen-science infrastructure project for studying altered-state reports; it is not a clinical service, a harm-reduction authority, or a safety endorsement for any consciousness-modifying technique.
System focus
- Citizen-science participation rather than closed internal research
- Web development as part of research method
- Open-science export paths and collaborator documentation
- Clear distinction between CIRCE's scientific leadership and Mesmer Prism's web-system contribution
References
Current references
These links ground the public description of AXP and the surrounding altered-state measurement infrastructure.
Project links
- CIRCE. "Altered Xperience Project." Live AXP survey page.
- CIRCE. "Collaboration for Interdisciplinary Research on Conscious Experience." Public CIRCE site.
- Mesmer Prism. "AXP Access Guide." Public collaborator guide.
Measurement context
- CIRCE e.V. "Collection of Altered-State Rating Scales and Questionnaires." Public questionnaire collection.
- Costines and Schmidt. "Exploring Altered States of Consciousness: A Pilot Study of Phenomenomics Using Citizen Science." Poster describing the earlier citizen-science pilot.