Mesmer Prism

Imagery, suggestion, and mechanism

Phenomenological Control

This line asks how imagery variation, absorption, porosity, suggestion, expectancy, hypnosis, induced vision, and psychedelic response relate to one another without being collapsed into a single grand “visionary type.” It is where subjective variation becomes something that can be sourced, compared, and argued carefully against physiology, lesion evidence, prevalence data, and newer shared-code findings between perception and imagery, including bounded reconstruction-grounded evidence from single-neuron recordings.

Back to work Brain Candy

Direction

What the project is clarifying

The strong version of this project is not a claim that all altered or spiritually inflected experience reduces to suggestion. The strong version is that several partially overlapping variables matter at once: imagery strength, absorption, expectancy-sensitive phenomenological control, cultural models of mind, and experimentally engineered perceptual conditions.

That matters because the literature often gets pulled into false choices: culture versus trait, imagination versus physiology, or mechanism versus meaning. The current archive is most useful when it keeps those levels distinct while still asking how they interact in reported experience.

The imagery side is stronger when it is grounded in several kinds of evidence at once: objective markers and cortical physiology, acquired-loss cases, population prevalence estimates, and emerging evidence that imagery reactivates part of the same representational machinery used in perception and object reconstruction.

Active lanes

  • Imagery variation, prevalence mapping, aphantasia, and objective imagery markers
  • Absorption, porosity, and culturally shaped spiritual presence reports
  • Phenomenological control, expectation, and hypnotic suggestibility
  • Engineered vision: flicker, ganzfeld, VR, and psychedelic-adjacent systems

Connected projects

  • Deep Dream for hallucination simulation and cyberdelic systems
  • Brain Candy for non-pharmacological state-shift design
  • SANE for broader social, narrative, and meaning-making questions

Boundary

What keeps the line disciplined

The project gets better when it refuses to treat one construct as a master key. Phenomenological control is not the same thing as absorption. Absorption is not the same thing as imagery vividness. Imagery vividness is not the same thing as religious or psychedelic response. The work becomes serious when those lines are compared without being conflated.

That is also why the current archive emphasizes narrower claims: objective imagery markers, bounded effects of suggestion, context-sensitive spiritual experience, and experimentally tractable induced-vision paradigms.

Current public emphasis

  • Trait clusters kept disaggregated
  • Strong source discipline around visionary or religious claims
  • Mechanism and meaning treated as interacting, not interchangeable

Reference Surface

Current references

These are the main anchors currently defining the Phenomenological Control line.

Imagery, absorption, and control

  • Galton, Francis. "Statistics of Mental Imagery." Mind (1880).
  • Keogh and Pearson. "The Blind Mind: No Sensory Visual Imagery in Aphantasia." Cortex (2018).
  • Keogh, Bergmann, and Pearson. "Cortical Excitability Controls the Strength of Mental Imagery." eLife (2020); Kay et al. "The Pupillary Light Response as a Physiological Index of Aphantasia, Sensory and Phenomenological Imagery Strength." eLife (2022).
  • Wright et al. "An International Estimate of the Prevalence of Differing Visual Imagery Abilities." Frontiers in Psychology (2024); Thorudottir et al. "The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery." Brain Sciences (2020).
  • Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted. "The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity." American Anthropologist (2010); Luhrmann and Morgain. "Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience." Ethos (2012).
  • Luhrmann et al. "Sensing the Presence of Gods and Spirits across Cultures and Faiths." PNAS (2021); Lifshitz, van Elk, and Luhrmann. "Absorption and Spiritual Experience: A Review of Evidence and Potential Mechanisms." Consciousness and Cognition (2019).
  • Lush et al. "Trait Phenomenological Control Predicts Experience of Mirror Synaesthesia and the Rubber Hand Illusion." Nature Communications (2020); Lush, Scott, Seth, and Dienes. "The Phenomenological Control Scale: Measuring the Capacity for Creating Illusory Nonvolition, Hallucination and Delusion." Collabra: Psychology (2021).
  • Lush, Dienes, and Seth. "Expectancies and the Generation of Perceptual Experience." In Expected Experiences (2023); Wadia et al. "A Shared Code for Perceiving and Imagining Objects in Human Ventral Temporal Cortex." Science (2026).

Induced vision, healing, and cyberdelic extensions

  • Wackermann, Putz, and Allefeld. "Ganzfeld-Induced Hallucinatory Experience, its Phenomenology and Cerebral Electrophysiology." Cortex (2008).
  • Hewitt et al. "Stroboscopically Induced Visual Hallucinations: Historical, Phenomenological, and Neurobiological Perspectives." Neuroscience of Consciousness (2025).
  • Amaya, Nierhaus, and Schmidt. "Thalamocortical Interactions Reflecting the Intensity of Flicker Light-Induced Visual Hallucinatory Phenomena." Network Neuroscience (2025).
  • Rosendahl, Alldredge, and Haddenhorst. "Meta-Analytic Evidence on the Efficacy of Hypnosis for Mental and Somatic Health Issues: A 20-Year Perspective." Frontiers in Psychology (2024).
  • Studerus et al. "Prediction of Psilocybin Response in Healthy Volunteers." PLOS ONE (2012).
  • Hartogsohn. "Cyberdelics in Context: On the Prospects and Challenges of Mind-Manifesting Technologies." Frontiers in Psychology (2023).
  • Dos Santos. "(Techno)Paganism: An Exploration of Animistic Relations with the Digital." Religions (2023); Kaup et al. "Psychedelic Replications in Virtual Reality and their Potential as a Therapeutic Instrument: An Open-Label Feasibility Study." Frontiers in Psychiatry (2023).
  • Glowacki et al. "Group VR Experiences Can Produce Ego Attenuation and Connectedness Comparable to Psychedelics." Scientific Reports (2022); Glowacki. "VR Models of Death and Psychedelics: An Aesthetic Paradigm for Design Beyond Day-to-Day Phenomenology." Frontiers in Virtual Reality (2024).