22/04/2026
A woman sits inside an fMRI scanner, eyes closed, no substances in her system.
Within minutes, a hexagonal lattice appears, her body boundaries dissolve, and she reports unity and an eternal present.
A new case study in NeuroImage mapped the brain of a 37-year-old who can voluntarily enter a transcendental visionary state on command, offering one of the clearest windows into non-ordinary consciousness without the confounding effects of drugs.
She has no formal training. The ability developed intuitively from adolescence, and across 20 fMRI sessions over five months she entered the state consistently.
A control group of 10 matched women asked to imagine vivid scenes showed none of the same brain activity.
The scans showed that her brain was fundamentally reorganising.
In the fully developed trance, her visual cortex decoupled from sensory and thalamic regions, gating out the external world so internal imagery could dominate.
Her frontoparietal networks increased connectivity inward. She remained fully lucid throughout.
Brain signal shifted toward lower entropy and higher complexity, patterns also seen after psilocybin sessions and in deep meditative states.
Psychedelics work by loosening the brain's predictive priors via 5-HT2A receptor agonism, increasing entropy and opening a plasticity window.
The study subject achieves something structurally identical through intention alone, indicating these states appear to be latent capacities of the brain's network architecture.
Taking a substance may simply be one path into a state of reorganisation the brain is already capable of.
This is a case report about one rare individual, so generalisations are premature. But the questions it opens are hard to dismiss.
Can voluntary access to these states be learned? Holotropic breathwork has shown for decades that non-ordinary states are reachable without pharmacology.
This persom seems to have found the key to her doors of perception without a substance. Does that mean we can all find ours too?