Caracterização funcional do transe mediúnico: eletroencefalografia e redes funcionais cerebrais

Abstract

Scientific studies on Mediumship and anomalous experiences were initiated by psychologists and psychiatrists at the end of the 19th century, but they were interrupted in a pre-paradigmatic phase, before researchers built consensus on the nature of these experiences. Currently, we are witnessing a resumption of studies in this area based on methodological advances in the observation of the phenomenon. In order to contribute to this resurgent perspective, this thesis has as its general objective to characterize the functional brain changes during the mediumistic trance and as specific objectives: to analyze the panorama of the study area Mediumship and to describe the topological indexes of brain functional networks in the mediumistic trance. This thesis is organized in multipaper format in which article 01 aims to fulfill the first specific objective and article 02, the second. The approach used is Network Theory in both articles, and in article 01 we used social networks to observe the semantic network of article titles and the coauthorship network of publishing articles on Mediumship. As a main result we obtained that while the semantic network is cohesive and reflects the history of research in the area, the co-authorship network is fragmented, which means that the authors are writing about the same theme, but are still far from working together. In article 02, we used the Dynamic Functional Brain Networks approach to analyze the topological indices of the networks in trance mediums, in comparison with a rest task and with the control group. As results, we achieved significant differences between trance and rest for the mediums group in the delta, theta, alpha and all frequencies networks, while in the control group we only found this difference in the delta network. Furthermore, in the mediums' group the difference happened systematically in the Left Hemisphere. The results were discussed based on other articles that also investigated mediums. Thus, this thesis achieved its established goals and presents itself as the first study to include the dynamic approach in Network Theory to study Mediumship.