# Phenomenological Control

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Description: A public guide to phenomenological control, imagery variation, expectation-shaped experience, source monitoring, absorption, porosity, hypnosis, induced vision, and meaning-making.
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---

Imagery, suggestion, and source monitoring

# Phenomenological Control

 Phenomenological control is the capacity to have experiences that fit an
 expectation, imaginative suggestion, or perceived task demand, sometimes while
 the experience feels involuntary
 ([Lush et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6);
 [Lush et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.29542);
 [Dienes and Lush, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221150521)).
 That does not make the experience fake. It also does not make expectation the
 master explanation for every vision, voice, bodily change, spiritual presence,
 psychedelic scene, tulpa, or VR hallucination. The harder question is which
 part of a report comes from imagery, which from suggestion, which from stimulus
 structure, which from source monitoring, and which from practice or culture
 ([Dijkstra et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557);
 [Luhrmann et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118);
 [Suzuki, 2026](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038)).
 This page helps separate expectation-shaped experience from fakery, pathology,
 spirituality, hallucination, and stimulus-driven effects.

 [Back to work](https://mesmerprism.com/#work)
 [Investigation map](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/phenomenological-control.html#investigation-map)
 [Current state](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/phenomenological-control.html#current-state)
 [References](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/phenomenological-control.html#references)

 Investigation map

## Separate variables before synthesis

 Start with a refusal. Imagery strength, phenomenological control, source
 monitoring, absorption, porosity, hypnotizability, psychedelic response, and
 ritual meaning are not interchangeable names for one hidden faculty. They can
 overlap in real people and real settings, but each one needs its own evidence
 route
 ([Kay et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484);
 [Lush et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6);
 [Luhrmann et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)).

 That separation makes the topic more useful. Imagery research can be checked
 against pupillometry, binocular rivalry, lesion cases, prevalence estimates,
 drawing, neuroimaging, and single-neuron work
 ([Keogh and Pearson, 2018](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.10.012);
 [Keogh et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.50232);
 [Wadia et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)).
 Phenomenological control can be checked against response to imaginative
 suggestion and expectancy-sensitive experiments. Source monitoring can be
 checked against reality-monitoring and subjective-signal-strength work
 ([Lush et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.29542);
 [Dijkstra and Fleming, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1)).
 Porosity and absorption can be checked against cross-cultural and ethnographic
 work on spiritual presence. Induced-vision systems can be checked against
 stimulus parameters and reported phenomenology
 ([Lifshitz et al., 2019](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.05.008);
 [Hewitt et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf020)).

 The synthesis comes after the separation. Vivid imagers, hypnotic responders,
 mystics, psychedelic users, tulpamancers, and VR participants should not be
 treated as the same kind of person. The better question is how particular
 combinations of person, practice, stimulus, setting, and interpretation move
 experience
 ([Studerus et al., 2012](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030800);
 [Luhrmann et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac005);
 [Suzuki et al., 2017](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2)).

### Start here

 Use this page when you need to separate expectation, imagery, source
 monitoring, stimulus effects, and cultural framing without reducing
 experience to fakery.

### Variables kept apart

- Imagery vividness, location, modality, and controllability

- Phenomenological control and response to imaginative suggestion

- Source monitoring and reality judgment

- Absorption as immersive attentional style

- Porosity as a culturally taught model of mind-world permeability

- Stimulus conditions: ganzfeld, ganzflicker, stroboscopic light, VR, and DeepDream-like systems

- Meaning-making frames: prayer, ritual, technopaganism, cyberdelics, and therapeutic context

### Claims held back

- A single proven visionary type remains unestablished.

- Expectation does not mean fakery.

- Induced vision remains narrower than full psychedelic experience.

- Digital or ritual settings need direct evidence before clinical claims.

- Transhistorical shaman-prophet-artist-scientist bridges need stronger historical sources.

 Field guide

## Why the separation matters

 A useful account can say which evidence carries which part of a claim. Galton
 anchors the older history of imagery variation. Keogh, Kay, and Wadia anchor
 the measurement and neural-reuse side. Lush anchors phenomenological control.
 Slater and Ehrsson keep expectancy-only accounts from getting too large.
 Luhrmann anchors porosity and spiritual presence. Hewitt and Amaya anchor
 induced visual phenomena. Suzuki's DeepDream frame separates classifier,
 generator, and discriminator roles. Dijkstra and Fleming anchor reality
 monitoring. Studerus keeps psychedelic response tied to dose, person, and
 setting. Hartogsohn and Dos Santos anchor the cyberdelic and digital-spiritual
 context
 ([Galton, 1880](https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-v.19.301);
 [Slater and Ehrsson, 2022](https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2022.834492);
 [Hartogsohn, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073235);
 [Dos Santos, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)).

 This keeps the tone clear. Calling an experience expectation-shaped is not the
 same as calling it fake. Calling an experience perceptual is not the same as
 granting it a single source or meaning. Report, physiology, attention, practice,
 stimulus design, and cultural framing are interacting constraints, and the
 source of an experience may be mixed
 ([Lush et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084082-4);
 [Dijkstra et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557)).

### Current focus

- Imagery variation, aphantasia, hyperphantasia, and objective imagery markers

- Phenomenological control, expectation, hypnotic suggestibility, and measurement context

- Source monitoring, reality judgment, and subjective signal strength

- Absorption, porosity, prayer practice, and spiritual-presence reports

- Ganzfeld, ganzflicker, stroboscopic light, VR, and DeepDream as induced-vision comparators

- Ritual, cyberdelics, digital spirituality, and the social life of altered-experience claims

### Related pages

- [Prophantasia](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/prophantasia.html) for projected imagery, self-testing, and citizen-science infrastructure

- [Deep Dream](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/deep-dream.html) for hallucination simulation and cyberdelic systems

- [Tulpas](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/tulpas.html) for trained inner others, imposition, and discernment boundaries

- [Fractal Optics](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/fractal-optics.html) for flicker, structured light, and induced-vision comparators

- [Brain Candy](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/brain-candy.html) for non-pharmacological state-shift design

- [SANE](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html) for broader social, narrative, and meaning-making questions

 Current state

## As of May 22, 2026

 The imagery side of the field is moving quickly. The strongest recent shift is
 not a new self-report scale but a tighter bridge between imagery and object
 perception. Wadia and colleagues' 2026 Science paper reports
 single-neuron evidence that imagined and perceived objects can use a shared
 code in human ventral temporal cortex. That supports a bounded shared-code
 claim. It does not make imagery identical to seeing, and it does not settle
 hallucination, spirituality, or phenomenological control
 ([Wadia et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)).

 The DeepDream side has also become more precise. Suzuki's 2026 paper proposes a
 C x G x D frame: classifier feature exposure, generative constraint,
 and discriminator or reality-monitoring thresholds. That is useful here because
 it keeps three questions apart. What content becomes available? What prior or
 image model shapes it? When is internally generated content treated as real?
 Phenomenological control belongs near the expectancy and suggestion side of
 that ecology. It does not own the whole explanation
 ([Suzuki, 2026](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038);
 [Gershman, 2019](https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00018)).

 The same current literature also pushes against easy measurement triumphalism.
 Vanbuckhave and colleagues' 2026 pupillometry study replicates group-level
 brightness-related pupil effects while warning that individual variability and
 weak vividness correlations make the protocol unready as a standardized
 aphantasia measure. Schwarzkopf and colleagues' 2026 work argues that vividness
 ratings still capture a broad range of internally generated visual experience,
 including "seeing" with eyes shut and externally projected imagery, while also
 sharpening the need to distinguish faint or unseen pictorial representation
 from complete absence
 ([Vanbuckhave et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2026.109378);
 [Schwarzkopf et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251887)).

 On the hypnosis side, Varga and colleagues' 2025 abstract-level record is a
 useful boundary warning: trait imagery outside hypnosis did not correlate
 meaningfully with hypnotizability in that sample, while imagery during hypnosis
 did. State, context, and task framing are therefore central,
 instead of turning imagery vividness into a universal predictor
 ([Varga et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2025.2531573)).

### Recent anchors

- Wadia et al. 2026: a final Science DOI supports the shared-code claim ([Wadia et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)).

- Suzuki 2026: the C x G x D frame sharpens the DeepDream bridge without turning it into validation ([Suzuki, 2026](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038)).

- Dijkstra et al. 2022 and Dijkstra and Fleming 2023: source monitoring and subjective signal strength stay separate from imagery vividness ([Dijkstra et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557); [Dijkstra and Fleming, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1)).

- Vanbuckhave et al. 2026: pupillometry remains promising but not a clean individual diagnostic shortcut ([Vanbuckhave et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2026.109378)).

- Schwarzkopf et al. 2026: vividness connects to varied internally generated visual experiences, including projected imagery reports ([Schwarzkopf et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251887)).

- Varga et al. 2025: hypnotizability relates more cleanly to imagery during hypnosis than to trait imagery outside hypnosis, in the available abstract-level record ([Varga et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2025.2531573)).

- Hewitt et al. 2025 and Amaya et al. 2025: stroboscopic light is now better framed as a serious but bounded induced-vision paradigm ([Hewitt et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf020); [Amaya et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00417)).

### Current constraint

 The evidence supports a richer public story than "it is all suggestion" or
 "it is all perception." It cannot support a single mechanism, a single
 trait, or a clinical promise.

 Synthesis

## Changing experience without flattening it

 Experience is shapeable, but it is not infinitely plastic. The hard question is
 at the boundary between expectation, imagery, stimulus, source judgment, and
 culture.

### Phenomenological control is a construct, not a master key

 The term is useful because it names a real methodological problem. People can
 generate experiences in response to imaginative suggestion, expectation, and
 perceived task demands, and some of those experiences can feel involuntary.
 Lush and colleagues make that problem visible in mirror-sensory and rubber-hand
 contexts, while the Phenomenological Control Scale extends the construct beyond
 explicitly hypnotic framing
 ([Lush et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6);
 [Lush et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.29542);
 [Lush et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084082-4)).

 Source monitoring adds a nearby but different problem. A person may generate an
 image, sensation, or felt presence and still need to judge where it came from.
 Dijkstra's reality-monitoring work belongs there. This is why vividness,
 expectation, absorption, and reality judgment need separate columns
 ([Dijkstra et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557);
 [Dijkstra and Fleming, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1)).

 The limit matters just as much. Slater and Ehrsson's reanalysis of rubber-hand
 data argues that synchronous multisensory stimulation remains the dominant
 driver even when hypnotisability and expectations are considered. That is the
 right model for the whole topic: phenomenological control can shape
 experience, but it does not erase stimulus structure, body-based evidence, or
 task-specific mechanisms
 ([Slater and Ehrsson, 2022](https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2022.834492)).

### Imagery is measurable, divided, and historically old

 The imagery line begins with a conservative claim. People differ in mental
 imagery, and that difference predates the modern labels aphantasia
 and hyperphantasia . Galton's nineteenth-century survey already
 recorded sharp variation and mutual disbelief between vivid and weak imagers.
 Contemporary work adds better handles: binocular-rivalry priming, pupillary
 response, cortical excitability, lesion cases, prevalence estimates, drawing
 and memory profiles, and now single-neuron evidence that imagery and perception
 can partially reuse object codes
 ([Galton, 1880](https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-v.19.301);
 [Keogh and Pearson, 2018](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.10.012);
 [Kay et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484);
 [Thorudottir et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10020059);
 [Wadia et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)).

 Those findings do not collapse the field into one vividness ladder. A person
 can have pictorial imagery without seeing it as if with the eyes. Another can
 report externally projected imagery, visual noise, hypnagogic effects, or
 presence without fitting cleanly into aphantasia or hyperphantasia. Location,
 vividness, modality, control, voluntariness, and context all need to be kept
 separate long enough to be measured
 ([Wright et al., 2024](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1454107);
 [Schwarzkopf et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251887);
 [Azanon et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001756)).

### Porosity is social as well as personal

 The cultural evidence does not say that belief simply invents perception. It
 says that communities teach people how to attend to inner life, how to interpret
 bodily or imaginal events, and how porous the boundary between mind and world is
 allowed to feel. Luhrmann's work on prayer and spiritual presence shows that
 absorption and porosity can both matter, but they matter differently: one is
 closer to immersive attentional style, the other to culturally taught
 mind-world boundaries
 ([Luhrmann et al., 2010](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x);
 [Luhrmann and Morgain, 2012](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x);
 [Luhrmann et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)).

 That makes control distributed. A report may be shaped by a person, teacher,
 ritual, interface, stimulus, room, dose, group, and story. Prayer and
 tulpamancy are useful comparison lanes here because both involve practice,
 attention, and discernment, but neither should be reduced to phenomenological
 control. A prepared frame can meet a real sensory perturbation, and the
 resulting experience can be sincere, trained, and constrained at the same time
 ([Luhrmann et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac005);
 [Mikles and Laycock, 2015](https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2015.19.1.87)).

### Expectation is not a synonym for fakery

 Expectation is often used too crudely. In one register it becomes a debunking
 weapon: the participant expected something, therefore the report is not real.
 In another register it becomes a magic explanation: set the frame correctly and
 anything can happen. The evidence supports neither move. It supports the narrower
 claim that expectation, suggestion, and task demand can help generate real
 reported experience, and that the route into the report is part of the
 phenomenon
 ([Lush et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084082-4);
 [Dienes and Lush, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221150521)).

 Varga's 2025 hypnosis-imagery result is useful here because it points away from
 trait simplification. General imagery vividness outside hypnosis did not do the
 work in that abstract-level record; state imagery during hypnosis did. That
 pattern fits the broader pattern: context, instruction, attention, and engagement
 can matter as much as stable trait labels
 ([Varga et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2025.2531573)).

### Engineered vision is the laboratory edge

 Ganzfeld, ganzflicker, stroboscopic light, recursive imagery, DeepDream, and
 VR hallucination designs make the question experimentally concrete. They show
 that visual phenomenology can be perturbed under describable conditions. Timing,
 luminance, color, field structure, rhythmicity, imagery ability, safety
 screening, and expectation all matter. This is why the induced-vision line is
 valuable: the stimulus can be specified
 ([Wackermann et al., 2008](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2007.05.003);
 [Konigsmark et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.05.007);
 [Hewitt et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf020);
 [Amaya et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00417)).

 The limit is equally important. Flicker, ganzfeld, VR, and DeepDream-like
 systems do not prove spiritual perception, universal trainability, clinical
 efficacy, or psychedelic equivalence. They are tools for asking sharper
 questions about how sensory input, expectation, attention, imagery, and meaning
 meet. Suzuki's newer C x G x D proposal strengthens that rule by separating
 feature exposure, generative constraint, and discriminator thresholds. The
 related [Deep Dream](https://mesmerprism.com/projects/deep-dream.html) page follows this
 same rule: partial visual overlap is not the same as a full altered-state
 model
 ([Suzuki et al., 2017](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2);
 [Suzuki, 2026](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038)).

### Psychedelics and VR need their own evidence lane

 Psychedelic response is partly shaped by dose, person, and setting, but that
 does not turn psychedelics into hypnosis or phenomenological control. The same
 caution applies to psychedelic-inspired VR. Open-label feasibility work and
 group VR studies show that immersive systems can alter selected experiences and
 measures, but they should not be described as therapeutic efficacy by analogy
 alone
 ([Studerus et al., 2012](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030800);
 [Kaup et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1088896);
 [Glowacki et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z)).
 Sensory dimensions of psychedelic experience deserve attention, but the sensory
 lane is only one part of the altered-state picture
 ([Aqil and Roseman, 2023](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2022.109300)).

### Meaning-making remains the open historical question

 The evidence can already say that imagery, absorption, expectation, perceptual
 perturbation, hypnosis, and psychedelic response are shaped by both person and
 context. It can also say, with historical caution, that magic, religion, and
 practical knowledge do not form a simple ladder where one replaces the other.
 They can coexist, interlace, and address different kinds of uncertainty
 ([Malinowski, 1948](https://archive.org/details/magicsciencereli00mali);
 [Tambiah, 1990](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621833)).

 What remains open is the stronger role question: whether societies repeatedly
 selected or cultivated people whose experience more readily moved toward
 presence, vision, bodily response, or conviction. That question belongs in the
 comparison, but it should stay marked as a hypothesis until the historical record
 is stronger. Late-modern media-mysticism sources help with a narrower history
 of cybernetics, psychedelia, occulture, and digital spirituality, not with an
 uninterrupted ancient lineage
 ([Davis, 2019](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781907222870/high-weirdness/);
 [Hartogsohn, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073235);
 [Dos Santos, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)).

 Evidence audit

## Current evidence state

### Solid

- Imagery variation is historically documented and measurable through several independent methods ([Galton, 1880](https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-v.19.301); [Kay et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484)).

- Phenomenological control is a real construct for expectation-responsive experience ([Lush et al., 2020](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6); [Lush et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.29542)).

- Porosity and absorption are separable culture/person variables in spiritual-presence work ([Luhrmann et al., 2021](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)).

- Ganzfeld, ganzflicker, and stroboscopic light can induce bounded visual phenomena under controlled conditions ([Wackermann et al., 2008](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2007.05.003); [Hewitt et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf020)).

- Hypnosis and psilocybin response depend partly on person and setting as well as stimulus or drug ([Rosendahl et al., 2024](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1330238); [Studerus et al., 2012](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030800)).

### Partial

- Wadia 2026 improves the shared-code imagery/perception bridge, but it supports bounded synthesis rather than broad mechanism claims ([Wadia et al., 2026](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)).

- Suzuki 2026 and the Dijkstra reality-monitoring work sharpen the source-monitoring boundary, but they do not turn phenomenological control into a master mechanism ([Suzuki, 2026](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038); [Dijkstra et al., 2022](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557)).

- Varga 2025 is useful for separating trait imagery from state imagery, but the available record is still abstract-level ([Varga et al., 2025](https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2025.2531573)).

- Cyberdelic and technopagan sources support contemporary framing and practice ecology, not clinical equivalence ([Hartogsohn, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073235); [Dos Santos, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)).

- Davis and media-history materials support a late-modern genealogy, not an uninterrupted ancient lineage ([Davis, 2019](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781907222870/high-weirdness/)).

### Speculative

- One stable visionary type across religious, artistic, scientific, psychedelic, and immersive-media settings remains a hypothesis, not a result.

- Cross-domain source-monitoring comparisons are promising, but prayer, tulpamancy, psychosis, hypnosis, psychedelics, and induced vision need separate methods ([Luhrmann et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac005)).

- Clinical-facing VR and cyberdelic systems should stay at the status, feasibility, or selected-measure level unless outcome studies support stronger claims ([Kaup et al., 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1088896)).

### Open

- Whether one stable perceptual-cognitive profile recurs across shamans, prophets, healers, artists, and scientists.

- Whether individual case studies can responsibly support paradigm-shift claims.

- How divine-minds typologies should refine the culture and context story ([McNamara, 2023](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14020222)).

- How far the history can go beyond late-modern media mysticism without stronger historical sources ([Tambiah, 1990](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621833); [Davis, 2019](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781907222870/high-weirdness/)).

 References

## Sources and entry points

 These references are grouped by role. Current web records and living pages were
 checked on May 22, 2026 unless a source has a fixed publication record.

### Imagery and measurement

- Galton. "[Statistics of Mental Imagery](https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/os-v.19.301)." Mind (1880).

- Keogh and Pearson. "[The Blind Mind: No Sensory Visual Imagery in Aphantasia](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.10.012)." Cortex (2018).

- Keogh, Bergmann, and Pearson. "[Cortical Excitability Controls the Strength of Mental Imagery](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.50232)." eLife (2020).

- Kay et al. "[The Pupillary Light Response as a Physiological Index of Aphantasia, Sensory and Phenomenological Imagery Strength](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484)." eLife (2022).

- Thorudottir et al. "[The Architect Who Lost the Ability to Imagine: The Cerebral Basis of Visual Imagery](https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10020059)." Brain Sciences (2020).

- Wright et al. "[An International Estimate of the Prevalence of Differing Visual Imagery Abilities](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1454107)." Frontiers in Psychology (2024).

- Wadia et al. "[A Shared Code for Perceiving and Imagining Objects in Human Ventral Temporal Cortex](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343)." Science (2026).

- Vanbuckhave et al. "[Pupil Changes to Voluntary and Involuntary Visual Imagery](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2026.109378)." Neuropsychologia (2026).

- Schwarzkopf et al. "[Vividness of Mental Imagery Reflects a Broad Range of Internally Generated Visual Experiences](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251887)." Royal Society Open Science (2026).

- Azanon et al. "[Individual Variability in Mental Imagery Vividness Does Not Predict Perceptual Interference with Imagery](https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001756)." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2025).

### Control, hypnosis, and embodiment

- Lush et al. "[Trait Phenomenological Control Predicts Experience of Mirror Synaesthesia and the Rubber Hand Illusion](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18591-6)." Nature Communications (2020).

- Lush, Scott, Seth, and Dienes. "[The Phenomenological Control Scale](https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.29542)." Collabra: Psychology (2021).

- Lush, Dienes, and Seth. "[Expectancies and the Generation of Perceptual Experience](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084082-4)." In Expected Experiences (2023).

- Dienes and Lush. "[The Role of Phenomenological Control in Experience](https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221150521)." Current Directions in Psychological Science (2023).

- Slater and Ehrsson. "[Multisensory Integration Dominates Hypnotisability and Expectations in the Rubber Hand Illusion](https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2022.834492)." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2022).

- Varga et al. "[Hypnotizability and Visual Imagery Inside and Outside Hypnosis](https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2025.2531573)." International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (2025).

- Rosendahl, Alldredge, and Haddenhorst. "[Meta-Analytic Evidence on the Efficacy of Hypnosis for Mental and Somatic Health Issues](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1330238)." Frontiers in Psychology (2024).

### Source monitoring and computational models

- Dijkstra, Kok, and Fleming. "[Perceptual Reality Monitoring: Neural Mechanisms Dissociating Imagination from Reality](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104557)." Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (2022).

- Dijkstra and Fleming. "[Subjective Signal Strength Distinguishes Reality from Imagination](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37322-1)." Nature Communications (2023).

- Gershman. "[The Generative Adversarial Brain](https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00018)." Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2019).

- Suzuki. "[Beyond the Reducing Valve](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1819038)." Frontiers in Psychology (2026).

### Absorption, porosity, and spiritual presence

- Luhrmann, Nusbaum, and Thisted. "[The Absorption Hypothesis](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x)." American Anthropologist (2010).

- Luhrmann and Morgain. "[Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x)." Ethos (2012).

- Lifshitz, van Elk, and Luhrmann. "[Absorption and Spiritual Experience](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.05.008)." Consciousness and Cognition (2019).

- Luhrmann et al. "[Sensing the Presence of Gods and Spirits across Cultures and Faiths](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)." PNAS (2021).

- Luhrmann et al. "[Learning to Discern the Voices of Gods, Spirits, Tulpas, and the Dead](https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac005)." Schizophrenia Bulletin 49 Supplement 1 (2023).

- Mikles and Laycock. "[Tracking the Tulpa](https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2015.19.1.87)." Nova Religio (2015).

- McNamara. "[God(s)' Mind(s) across Culture and Context](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14020222)." Religions (2023).

- Studerus et al. "[Prediction of Psilocybin Response in Healthy Volunteers](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030800)." PLOS ONE (2012).

### Induced vision and cyberdelics

- Wackermann, Putz, and Allefeld. "[Ganzfeld-Induced Hallucinatory Experience, its Phenomenology and Cerebral Electrophysiology](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2007.05.003)." Cortex (2008).

- Konigsmark, Bergmann, and Reeder. "[The Ganzflicker Experience](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.05.007)." Cortex (2021).

- Hewitt et al. "[Stroboscopically Induced Visual Hallucinations](https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf020)." Neuroscience of Consciousness (2025).

- Amaya, Nierhaus, and Schmidt. "[Thalamocortical Interactions Reflecting the Intensity of Flicker Light-Induced Visual Hallucinatory Phenomena](https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00417)." Network Neuroscience (2025).

- Suzuki, Roseboom, Schwartzman, and Seth. "[A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2)." Scientific Reports (2017).

- Hartogsohn. "[Cyberdelics in Context](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073235)." Frontiers in Psychology (2023).

- Dos Santos. "[(Techno)Paganism](https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)." Religions (2023).

- Aqil and Roseman. "[More Than Meets the Eye: The Role of Sensory Dimensions in Psychedelic Brain Dynamics, Experience, and Therapeutics](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2022.109300)." Neuropharmacology (2023).

- Kaup et al. "[Psychedelic Replications in Virtual Reality](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1088896)." Frontiers in Psychiatry (2023).

- Glowacki et al. "[Group VR Experiences Can Produce Ego Attenuation and Connectedness Comparable to Psychedelics](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z)." Scientific Reports (2022).

### History and embodied meaning

- Malinowski. [Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays](https://archive.org/details/magicsciencereli00mali) . Free Press (1948).

- Tambiah. [Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621833) . Cambridge University Press (1990).

- Davis. [High Weirdness](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781907222870/high-weirdness/) . MIT Press (2019).