In his Introduction to Psychology, the father of psychology as a scientific discipline, Wihlem Wundt, wrote that “This science has to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations.” However, his use of introspection, or “internal perception,” lacked the tools for observing, reproducing, or experimentally modulating these internal perceptions, and the field of psychology was on the brink of collapse. In a coup, a school of researchers who rejected any ambition of empirically studying the mind came to dominate the field with behaviorism. In the generations that followed, psychology, the study of the mind, became a misnomer. While psychology departments continue to exist in academia today, laboratories are largely focused on behavioral or clinical neuroscience.
Is it possible to study the mind? Various metaphysical assumptions must first be addressed. For one, whether the mind is actually any different than the physical. If “physicalism” is true, then why can’t physicalist accounts explain how subjective experience exists? (e.g., David Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness). Or is it the mind, and not the physical, which is the fundamental nature of reality (idealism)? Or are the mind and body like branches from the same tree (dual-aspect monism)?
For Edmund Husserl (an idealist), phenomenology was the answer to study the mind—a first-person “science” where all things outside of the mind should be bracketed off, suspending belief about the outside natural world entirely. For Daniel Dennett (a physicalist), heterophenomenology was the answer—a third-person science where the validity of the inner first-person was suspended, as psychologists move forward collecting data on what people say about those experiences.
Today, we arrive at an inflection point. Scientists are now taking heterophenomenology one step further, asking not only what people say about their experiences, but also whether these experiences can be validated. This key innovation requires that we revisit the nature of science and the nature of empirical observation. For a scientist to claim an observation of nature is real, like the moons of Jupiter that Galileo observed with his telescope, the phenomenon must be reproducible, and it must also be valid. In other words, any single scientific instrument or approach might consistently yield a result, but this could be an artefact, as trivial as a piece of dust on the lens giving the appearance of an object in space. To validate any scientific finding, or to show that an instrument is measuring what it intends to measure, multiple views or approaches must be taken to arrive at the same conclusion independently.
With this degree of evidence and level of rigor, any claim about nature moves from weak to compelling. This is the inflection point for the nature of the mind. Beyond Husserl, where only one viewpoint on the mind was considered sufficient for its understanding. And beyond Dennett, where the veracity of any viewpoint could not be ascertained.
In the current era, we can collect and analyze experience reports en masse with the aid of the internet and artificial intelligence. We can determine not only whether reported phenomena during “internal perception” are reproducible, but also whether they are validated across methods that induce deep states of internal perception. In this way, we can chart new territory into the mind to address the facts of consciousness, its structure, its combinations and relations, the laws that govern them, and their relationships to the brain and to nature at large.
In Dikovskaya et al., 2025, the authors conducted a first-of-its-kind pilot study, a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of 300 narrative reports collected across online sources. Importantly, 12 methods were selected to examine the potential for reproducible observation and validation, including deep meditations, float tank experiences, and various psychoactive drugs. These pharmacological induction methods included those commonly described as “psychedelic” or mind-manifesting (a nomenclature this research sought to validate or falsify), and those labeled as “deliriants,” toxic substances known to result in extreme hallucinations. A novel “authenticity analysis” was employed through a heterophenomenological approach in order to determine the authenticity of the observations within the narrative reports, without assigning veracity by the scientific team.
As expected, the reports from the deliriant class of substances commonly included words like “hallucination,” “delusion,” or “was convinced,” resulting in the lowest authenticity scores. In contrast, meditation and float tank reports commonly included words like “realized,” “aware,” or “understood,” resulting in some of the highest authenticity scores. As for the “psychedelics,” these were mixed—while psilocybin, which is highly selective for the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, resulted in high authenticity ratings, LSD, which, in addition to 5-HT2A, also activates dopamine-2 receptor signaling that is known to be elevated during psychosis, resulting in less authentic, or more “illusory” ratings.
But what was it that these individuals experienced? Were these experiences reproducible? Were they valid? While some nightmarish hallucinations were reproduced from deliriants, including spiders and blood, these were easily invalidated by their absence as the drug wore off. In contrast, the experiences during the deep meditation, float tank, and other trance-like states, retained reported authenticity in the days and weeks that followed and were validated across reports. Whereas deliriants brought a state of confusion, delusion, and nightmarish hallucination, the trance-like states evoked a clear trajectory from a baseline experience into a metaphysical one, a trajectory driven by an intense dilation of time, and a thorough dissolution of the self and body.
Then, often, a very specific structural motif emerged, as if the combinations and relations of consciousness itself became revealed in internal perception. This structure, described often as a massive wheel, spiral, or “vortex…at the core of matter, time, space, and thought,” is certainly reproducible and validated across various approaches—but is this yet enough evidence to claim a true observation of a phenomenon of the mind, a natural structure with some role in the nature consciousness? Or does it only exist as an artefact, like dust on the lens?
In 1926, Heinrich Klüver characterized similar visual patterns or “form constants” that have been attributed to noise in the visual cortex during altered states of consciousness. Yet reports of reality itself being structured as a vortex suggest something more than a simple overlay of forms, like spiders and blood, leaving open the nature of this particular phenomenon for the mind.
Consciousness Essential Reads
As research teams around the world have begun to characterize the nature of non-ordinary experiences, including the use of tools to model the deconstruction of consciousness, we enter an era of employing methods to modulate, reproduce, and observe internal perception. With new technologies and capabilities to harness big data and to image brain function, we are poised to address the nature of consciousness and its structures, which, like a scaffold, might support our subjective experience from the neural firings in our brain. We are now poised to address how these phenomena relate, not only to the brain, but also to nature at large, in understanding relationships to our current understanding of geometry and physics, while pointing toward establishing metaphysics as a future scientific discipline. For now, psychology has come home to the study of the mind.
