Comparing psychedelic and meditation experience reports with Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Psychedelics and meditation are known for their potential to induce personally meaningful and even transformative experiences. However, it’s unclear how similar these experiences are, or how they differ from each other. This explorative study used Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to compare reports of personally meaningful subjective experiences facilitated by either psychedelic substances or meditation. Participants (n=203) wrote open-ended narrative reports about their most meaningful experience facilitated either with psychedelics (n=138) or meditation (n=65). These reports were analysed with word frequency analyses, LDA topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The frequency analyses did not find statistically significant differences between the word distributions in the two groups and qualitative outlook on the results supported the similarity of the experiences. Both experiences expressed positive emotions on average, but psychedelics seemed to be more emotionally charged, showing higher levels of positive and negative sentiments compared to the meditation reports. Psychedelic experiences were also more socially oriented. These results suggest that the two types of subjective experiences might be quite similar in general, but emotional intensity and social contexts could be distinguishing factors between them. Challenges with the dataset, such as heterogeneous and small samples, limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, it offers new hypotheses and suggestions for future research on transformative experiences.