BDSM can function as a spiritual ritual that produces altered states of consciousness, sharing key elements with extreme spiritual practices: pain or ordeal, spiritual meaning, and transformative potential. The growing interest in BDSM in Western societies may reflect these ritual and spiritual roles it fulfills for many practitioners. The paper argues that BDSM merits further study within transpersonal psychology, building on prior work that compared BDSM to extreme ritual.
A model links spontaneous cognitive events like daydreams to ongoing responses to external stimuli. In experiments using a simple signal-detection task under partial sensory deprivation, faster signal presentation or higher short-term memory demands significantly reduced reports of task-irrelevant thoughts and imagery. Graded financial rewards for accurate detection progressively decreased extraneous fantasies. Distressing information given before trials significantly increased reports of spontaneous daydreaming during the detection task.