Psychedelic and meditation reports were broadly similar, but psychedelic experiences appeared more emotionally intense.
Evidence
This exploratory study analyzed 197 open-ended reports of meaningful experiences, including 134 psychedelic and 63 meditation reports, using text similarity, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.
Caveat
The conclusions are limited by self-reported narratives and methodological limits in the dataset and NLP approach.
Simplified
Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it is unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (N = 197) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n = 134) or meditation (n = 63). These reports were analysed with text similarity analyses, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The semantic and lexical contents of the reports were highly similar and both groups expressed positive emotions on average. However, psychedelic experience reports were more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to more neutral meditation experiences. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity could be a distinguishing factor between them. Challenges with the NLP methods and the dataset limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.
Key numbers
39.27 years
Age of Participants
Average age of participants.
27.78% of 5058 unique words
Shared Vocabulary
Percentage of unique words shared between and experience reports.
0.972
Cosine Similarity
Cosine similarity score between average embeddings of and reports.
Full Text
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Psychedelic Science