Some People Can ‘Absorb’ a Richer Version of Reality, Scientists Say. Are You One of Them?

People who are high in absorption live in a rich inner world of imagination, but they also “absorb” external experiences. They often experiment with consciousness-altering substances and seek intense encounters with nature, travel, art, and spirituality. The reason why high absorbers experience things in such a different way is still a mystery. It might be genetic, related to trauma—or it could be something that you can learn.

Psychologists Auke Tellegen, PhD, and Gilbert Atkinson, PhD, were the first to label trait absorption in 1974. They were researching why some people fall under hypnosis more easily than others. The only thing they found that consistently correlated with hypnotizability was a collection of attributes, which they labeled as absorption. Individuals high in absorption appear to be drawn toward episodes where they’re engrossed in the experience and not evaluating it or focused on any particular goal. This kind of attention makes people impervious to distraction and gives them “an altered sense of reality in general, including an empathically altered sense of self.”

Tellegen continued to study trait absorption and created a 34-question survey, called the Tellegen Absorption Scale, that can be used to identify how absorptive someone is. It features prompts like:

• When I listen to music, I can get so caught up in it that I don’t notice anything else.

• My thoughts often occur as visual images rather than as words.

• Sometimes I experience things as if they were doubly real.

• The crackle and flames of a wood fire stimulate my imagination.

• I sometimes “step outside” my usual self and experience a completely different state of being.

Many people have studied absorption since, but it still isn’t well understood. Absorption “is reliably associated with a constellation of psychological, cognitive, and behavioral traits,” according to one study published in Neuroimage: Reports. Those traits are a mixed bag. People high in absorption have excellent dream recall and are highly creative, often tending to love fantasy. They are usually strong in empathy and neural emotional processing, and they find it easy to enter into vivid imagined scenarios, like when they daydream. They are also more likely to have rich spiritual encounters—conversations with God, trance states, or visions.

On the flip side, researchers have uncovered a correlation between absorption and early trauma, according to Michael Lifshitz, PhD, who has studied absorption extensively. And just like their experiences of joy, absorptive people’s experiences of anxiety are especially intense—perhaps because they can imagine the negative scenario so plainly that it begins to feel like reality. Anxiety for an absorptive person can lead to physical symptoms such as nausea and vomiting, chest pains, obesity, and bulimia.

Highly absorptive people are deeply responsive to altered states. They’re not only easy to hypnotize, but they have a much more impactful experience on psychedelics than those low in absorption. Lifshitz—an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal—is a highly absorptive person, himself. In his own research, he has found that absorptive people often enjoy the experience of having their consciousness morph. “The texture of their own experience is interesting to them,” Lifshitz says. “They like feeling their experience change… When anything alters my consciousness I’m just so interested, and I find it so enjoyable that my consciousness is shifting.”

Lifshitz theorized that using the Tellegen scale—the aforementioned 34-question assessment—would help psychologists who do psychedelic-assisted therapy spot who was likely to benefit most from the treatment. So he suggested using the scale to to some experts he knew who administered ketamine-assisted therapy. As it turns out, the scale was highly effective at identifying who would benefit from the treatment. The more absorptive you were, the greater the likelihood your symptoms—such as depression—would be mitigated by the therapy.

However, researchers still don’t know what causes some people to be more absorptive than others. They’ve learned that it does run in families and that many highly absorptive people experienced early childhood trauma. Those—of course—might be connected, since trauma often affects whole families. Trauma might also explain absorptive people’s vivid imaginations. In a traumatic moment, people’s brains often protect them through disassociation, allowing them to “escape” into alternate imagined worlds, Lifshitz notes. Yet trauma fails to explain high absorbers’ intense responses to external stimuli like music or nature, he adds.

Along with colleagues at McGill and researchers in France and the Netherlands, Lifshitz tried to find brain behaviors that would explain absorption, but that was a dead end, too. They compared functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people who were high on the Tellegen absorption scale and similar personality scores. “Interestingly, we weren’t able to find anything in the structure or kind of resting state function of the brain that was consistently predicting absorption in both samples,” he says. “We found some patterns that looked kind of promising, but then none of them replicated in the other sample.”

Scientists have long believed that trait absorption and hypnotizability are something you either have or don’t have—it’s consistent throughout your life. But Lifshitz says his team’s research has revealed otherwise. For example, a person’s absorption can measurably increase after a hike in the mountains, and even more so over an eight-week course of ketamine-assisted therapy.Lifshitz thinks that has to do with the predictive brain.

“You’re always kind of living through a prediction of what’s there, not only what’s actually there,” he says. “Your brain has a very particular model of the world that it holds stable, in order to be able to manage the intense complexity of what’s happening. So if you loosen up that predictive model, then you might actually realize that there’s information that you’ve been missing… Things like psychedelics and meditation can kind of loosen the high-level predictions that your brain is making about things.”

The difference in how absorptive people respond to certain interventions has piqued Lifshitz’s curiosity about tailoring psychological interventions to be more effective with different kinds of people. Doctors and therapists may prescribe the same practices for everyone—such as mindfulness meditation—which can result in frustration, because different people respond differently. In psychology, “There’s a really strong tendency for one size fits all,” he says. “And I think if we want to actually do good by people, we should get over that.”

He’s also interested in seeing if the trait of high absorption is teachable. He worked with colleague Tanya Luhrmann, PhD—a professor of anthropology at Stanford—on a study. Together, they studied people who have created something called a Tulpa. Tulpas have a history in Tibetan Buddhism as a being that is willed into existence through spiritual practice. However, many of the people who these researchers studied treated their Tulpas more like an imaginary friend or another being brought into existence through meditation.

“A lot of [the research subjects] are engineers, scientists—like very rational people,” Lifshitz says. “And it just shows me that the imagination is so powerful, that there’s so much we don’t even know yet about, if you invest energy into your imagination, it can actually come to life.”

He believes that through experiences like nature exposure, psychedelic therapy, or practices like creating a Tulpa, people can train themselves to be more absorptive. And that, from his perspective, would create a better world.

“I’m personally really interested in the idea that you can actually train yourself to have life feel more magical,” Lifshitz says. “You can make life enchanted through the power of your mind.” — Susan Lahey