[TL;DR] Non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS) have quietly shaped insight and creativity throughout the history of science, philosophy, and art, yet stigma has fragmented their exploration and driven it underground. This attaches unnecessary risk to these practices while foreclosing their benefits. We think NOS’s are best understood as tools for discovery rather than arbiters of truth, which is exactly why the field needs shared standards rather than solely private experimentation. The upcoming Non-Ordinary States Advocacy study is our attempt to move the conversation from anecdote toward patterns, in the service of optimal shared protocols, standards, and practices.
Tell us about YOUR non-ordinary experiences and how they’ve contributed to your work, anonymously, below:
https://s.sensoriaresearch.org/nos
Have you ever had a dream you found genuinely insightful? A problem that looked different in the morning, an answer that arrived while you slept? If so, congratulations: you have already experienced a non-ordinary state! Non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS) are a natural and recurring feature of human experience, meaning-making, and inquiry, and dreaming is only the most familiar doorway. NOS’s are often treated as a narrow category, with psychedelics standing in for the whole domain. This framing is misleading. Psychedelics are only one of many ways to access non-ordinary states, and not necessarily the most foundational or accessible. Breathwork, meditation, sensory deprivation, extended contemplation, sleep-related states, and structured attention practices all reliably produce alterations in perception, cognition, and meaning without any pharmacological input. We cannot, and should not, eliminate these states or the confounding questions they pose. What we can do is determine whether they are encountered accidentally, pursued deliberately, or studied systematically.
Despite its title, this study was not conceived from a fascination with non-ordinary states for their own sake. It emerges from a growing discomfort with the limits of how we currently pursue knowledge, inquiry, and human empowerment in a world that is changing faster than our models for understanding it.
We increasingly face a class of problems whose scale and complexity exceed our existing cognitive, institutional, and epistemic tools. Climate instability, technological acceleration, geopolitical fragmentation, and social distrust interact across vast domains in nonlinear ways. These are not problems that yield easily to linear reasoning, isolated expertise, or incremental optimization. Much of contemporary research operates within a domain of known knowns and known unknowns. We refine what we already understand and probe gaps we can clearly articulate. That approach has served science extraordinarily well, but it quietly assumes that the most important variables are already on the table. When challenges become genuinely unprecedented, and their uncertainty unstructured, that assumption becomes less safe.
We are not claiming that non-ordinary states provide solutions to any of these problems. We are claiming something narrower: there are a variety of a priori and anecdotal reasons to believe they may offer an angle on generating insight, catalyzing creativity and openness, and facilitating collective inquiry that is currently underexplored. And here we should be honest about the limits of our own evidence. We remember Kekulé dreaming the ring structure of benzene and Kary Mullis describing the idea for PCR arriving on a mountain road. We do not hear about the countless dream-insights and visionary certainties that led nowhere. We do not actually know the ratio between them. That missing denominator is not a reason to dismiss this domain. It is a reason to finally study it properly.
Here is what we find genuinely troubling. In modern contexts, especially as regards psychedelics, cultural and legal stigma have done something counterproductive. They have not prevented exploration so much as fragmented it and driven it underground. Scientists, clinicians, and thinkers continue to engage with and benefit from non-ordinary states privately while avoiding substantive public discussion. Extraordinary experiences are had, interpretations are formed, and sometimes strong claims are made, all without shared standards, review, or collective sense-making.
This is not a neutral or inconsequential outcome. Driving exploration underground removes safeguards and prevents the development of shared frameworks, protocols, and criteria for discernment, making it harder to separate genuine insight from illusion, overinterpretation, or wishful thinking. Marginalizing NOS’s as a part of inquiry gives us the worst of both worlds: more real harm, because the safeguards are missing, and more dubious insight passed off as real, because very few know how to check.
Our culture, on this question, is neither sufficiently open-minded nor sufficiently rigorous.
Non-ordinary states are engines of discovery, not arbiters of truth. They can reframe a problem, loosen an entrenched assumption, and surface an intuition you would not have reached by ordinary deliberation. What they cannot do is certify that the resulting insight is correct. As Sam Gandy, Manesh Girn, and others have argued, these states are primarily tools for improving discovery, and every insight they produce still has to survive validation by ordinary-state methods, the same scrutiny we would apply to any other hypothesis. It is precisely because validation happens out-of-state that the field needs shared protocols, expertise standards, and coordination.
This brings us to what we think is the most important question in the whole endeavor. Non-ordinary states can generate subjective certainty without objective validity: the feeling of insight without the insight itself, what our study calls the “illusion trap.” What is the actual ratio of genuinely productive experiences to merely compelling ones, and what predicts the difference? This is the juiciest empirical question in this entire space, and beginning to address it is a large part of what our survey is for. We want to move from anecdotes to patterns, to identify recurring mechanisms, constraints, and practices across diverse contexts, and to gently bring what is currently private and fragmented into a form that can be shared and refined. The point is not to be cheerleaders. On a question like this, the responsible posture is to be among its most serious critics.
We are conducting a survey of frontier researchers and specialists across disciplines.
The survey documents experience with non-ordinary states, their relationship to professional work and insight, the epistemic effects that extend beyond creativity, including systems-level thinking, epistemic humility, tolerance for uncertainty, and collaborative capacity, and the risks, failure modes, and safeguards that practitioners consider essential. We are also conducting in-depth interviews to capture the forms of expertise and experience that the formal literature has not yet represented.
And we are not stopping at description. The same effort is producing concrete tools: a validated assessment of practitioner competence, so that “expertise” in these states means something measurable rather than self-certified, and detailed, worked protocols drawn from consortium-level insight-generation studies. The aim is to get past general advice like “start with low-hanging fruit such as meditation and breathwork” and “never explore alone,” sensible as that is, and toward the shared, standardized methods the field actually lacks.
The upcoming study also proposes that different non-ordinary states appear suited to different cognitive and epistemic tasks: reframing problems, integrating systems, enhancing collaboration. Matching states to functions in this way, and accounting for practitioner experience the way meditation research distinguishes expert from novice, is something a number of our contemporaries are now working to make intentional, measurable, and accountable rather than accidental. The goal is not indiscriminate exploration. It is closer to the opposite.
At a deeper level, this work is about responsibility. Our position is this: the systematic exclusion of non-ordinary states from legitimate inquiry is itself an epistemic failure, with real consequences. If these states are irrelevant or inherently misleading, then their quiet use within scientific communities is a problem worth making explicit and addressing. If they are relevant, and the historical record, the neuroscience, and the private testimony of working scientists all suggest they may be, then refusing to engage with them openly is a different kind of problem, and arguably a more serious one.
The question is no longer whether non-ordinary states will be explored. That is already happening.
The question is no longer whether they have legitimacy. Contemporary policy, philosophy, and science are embracing that premise, unevenly but unmistakably.
The real question is whether we are willing to bring that exploration fully into the open, build the frameworks it needs, and take responsibility for doing it well.
Come on, everybody.
— Alex & Leo
Tell us how YOUR non-ordinary experiences have contributed to your work, anonymously, below:
