Reading time: 5 min
“A greater world”, the film adapted from Corine Sombrun’s story, hits cinemas on October 30. Now a shaman, Corine Sombrun investigates the neurological changes that occur during trance. Over the last ten years or so, our Western societies have been trying to understand shamanic trance through the prism of neuroscience.
It was supposed to be a simple business trip
In 2001, musicologist Corine Sombrun was sent by BBC World radio to Mongolia to visit the Tsaatan ethnic group. Her assignment was to collect sounds as part of a report on shamanic traditions. Among many ethnic groups, being a shaman is a gift. Historically, its role has been to bring about social cohesion and link the human world with the spirit world for healing. Spirits are responsible for maintaining harmony in the world. When a person does something that destabilizes the harmony of the world, the spirits send the person an alarm that materializes in the form of problems. The person addresses his or her problem to the shaman, who then enters a trance to the sound of a drum to interrogate the spirit world, find out the reason for their anger and heal/help the person. When Corine Sombrun attended her first shamanism session, the first sounds of the drum put her into a trance: she shook, shook and howled like a wolf. The shaman tells her that she must train to become a shaman, for it is her destiny. If she doesn’t, she’ll create an imbalance in the harmony of the world and face many problems. From then on, Sombrun embarked on an 8-year journey back and forth between France and Mongolia to become a shaman in turn.
Over the years, Corinne Sombrun has been able to put into words what she experiences in trance. She loses all sense of time and space, doesn’t perceive physical pain (yet beats herself up), possesses strength she doesn’t normally have (carries an 8kg drum at arm’s length for 2 hours) and has visions with her eyes closed. But above all, she perceives disharmonious spaces. And when she perceives them, she begins to emit unfamiliar sounds, languages and chants that she feels will bring these spaces back into balance. She also recounts how her senses are hijacked from their basic function, as if she’s reached a “level 2 functioning” of her senses: she doesn’t see disharmony, for example, but feels it. She sniffs out dissonance and sings to correct it.
As you’ve probably guessed, Open Mind is all about neuroscience. So when we hear this, we’re full of questions: what does brain activity look like under trance? Does trance modify the way the brain functions, giving it access to other capacities? Does trance permanently alter the brain?
When she can simply will her brain from a pathological to a healthy state
As it happens, Corine Sombrun asked herself the same questions we did. At the end of her shamanic training, she contacted, among others, Professor Pierre Flor-Henry, a neuropsychiatrist at the Alberta Hospital in Canada, to begin a research project into the functioning of her brain in trance. The tool used to measure his brain function is called an EEG (Electroencephalogram): electrodes are placed on the scalp to measure the brain’s electrical activity. To do this, Sombrun had to learn to go into trance without her drum, as it could not be used in the presence of the EEG equipment. But above all, she had to learn how to bring herself out of trance by sheer willpower.
Prof. Flor-Henry and his team then compared the results of his brain at rest and in trance. In a resting state, Sombrun’s brain function was perfectly normal. His EEG tracings looked like this:
Extract from TedxParis Salon
But in the trance state, the tracings looked like this:
Extract from TedxParis Salon
The researchers then compared Sombrun’s findings with the EEG results of three control groups: one group consisted of people with severe depression, another of people with schizophrenia, and the final group of people with manic disorders. They came to the following conclusion: Sombrun’s trance tracings have similarities with all three pathologies at the same time.
The difference is that Sombrun has the ability to put his healthy brain into pathological states, and comes back from them by mere will, without leaving any after-effects.
Flor-Henry’s results also indicate that his state of consciousness shifts from an analytical to a more intuitive mode of thinking, focused on immediate experience. This is achieved by deactivating the prefrontal cortex (governing reasoning, inhibition, action control, decision-making, etc.) and activating the posterior somatosensory cortex (the area receiving information from the body’s surface).
Trance: the untapped potential of every human being?
Today, trance is seen as an altered state of consciousness. There are various altered states of consciousness that we can place on a spectrum ranging from the normal to the pathological. Normal altered states of consciousness include meditative states and flow (a state of maximum engagement and concentration reached by a person when completely absorbed in what they are doing). These are voluntary states of altered consciousness. In pathological states of altered consciousness, we find non-voluntary alterations of consciousness such as loss of sense of self or hallucinations.
Where does trance fall on this spectrum? Is it close to pathological states of consciousness, or closer to normal states? For other researchers, trance is a new state of the brain, which cannot be compared with pathological states. In fact, it’s a potential we all have within us.
Corine Sombrun has created a sound based on her own trance experiences and those of the shamans around her. This sound brings together the particular drum rhythms that seem to trigger trance. In collaboration with researcher Elie Desmond-Le Quéméner, these sounds were looped during the “Transe et Création” workshop at the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole in December 2015. Out of 20 participants, 16 went into trance. Research is still ongoing on this project, however, this event shows that trance states could be much more common than we think. We ask ourselves: could trance states be an untapped human potential rather than a psychopathology or a gift?
What’s more, trance, as an altered state of consciousness, is much more widespread throughout the world than our Western beliefs would lead us to believe. Going back to the 1970s, one study showed that, out of a sample of 488 societies surveyed worldwide, 90% used altered states of consciousness in their practices.
What does the future hold for shamanic trance in Western society?
A number of postulates now exist about shamanic trance and are guiding research projects.
Firstly, there is the question of whether trance might have a role to play in promoting the healing of our Western illnesses. For example, some postulate that psychotic people are trapped in this altered state of consciousness, and that shamans could bring them back to an ordinary state of consciousness. This hypothesis opens up a link between a scientific, Cartesian world and that other world to which we have little access: the unconscious (which shamans call the spirit world).
Secondly, some hypothesize that trance leads to an augmented model of reality perception. What we see in a normal state of consciousness is not the world, but a model of the world created by our brain. And trance would be a way of accessing information that is all around us, but which we wouldn’t perceive in an ordinary state of consciousness. The brain functions like a filter. It receives millions of pieces of information per second, but not all of them are consciously used. The brain selects only what we need. During trance, the amount of information used by the brain would increase.
Another postulate is that trance could be a tool for individual development, self-knowledge and, ultimately, well-being. Trance could also be used as a tool to facilitate the creative process.
Whatever the postulates, shamanic trance is today a major subject of research in the neurosciences. The studies carried out to date on trance states promise great discoveries, but have yet to be confirmed by large-scale studies. It will take several more years of research before strong hypotheses can be put forward on the structure and mechanisms underlying the trance state.
Sources
Flor-Henry P., Shapiro Y., Sombrun C. 2017. Brain changes during a shamanic trance: Altered modes of consciousness, hemispheric laterality, and systemic psychobiology.
Money, M. 2000. Shamanism and complementary therapy.
Northoff, G.Humans, Brains, and Their Environment: Marriage between Neuroscience and Anthropology? Neuroview, Volume 65, issue 6, P748-751, March 25, 2010
Oohashi, T. 2002. Electroencephalographic measurement of possession trance in the field.
G21 Swisstainability Forum 2015, Corine Sombrun books for Nice Future magazine
TEDxParisSalon 2012 – Corine Sombrun – Is shamanic trance a brain capacity?
Author: Anaïs Roux
