Michael Winkelman

The concept of the Affective Core Self (ACS) represents a system of subcortical-cortical-midline structures that manage instinctual emotional responses that humans share with mammals, involving homologous brain regions and similar neural responses, emotional displays, and behavioral manifestations. ACS processes produce consciousness through linking unconscious dynamics and raw emotions with affective assessments of internal and environmental stimuli. ACS functions provide self-consciousness, integrating interoceptive states, homeostatic processes, and primordial affective assessments with salience as inputs for higher-level referential systems to generate pre-verbal mood states. This perception is the basis of first-person pre-reflective self-referential perspectives, providing evaluative mood processes at the basis of a hierarchically layered, multi-dimensional self. The experiential and phenomenological features produced by ACS structures reflected in awe, bliss, joy, peace, emotional warmth, caring, absorption, self-loss, and unity of consciousness correspond directly to central features of spiritual experiences. These spiritual experiences reflect intensified primary emotional functions from enhanced positive emotional salience derived from mammalian attachment systems and down-regulation of threat systems. ACS features are central to the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) scales in experiences of positive mood, ego dissolution/unity, noetic quality, and peacefulness. Prediction of benefits of psychedelic therapy by MEQ scales measuring positive mood illustrates mechanisms involving autonomic resolution rather than changes in beliefs. Central roles of ACS in psychedelic mechanisms is revealed by prediction of persisting therapeutic benefits by ACS characteristics associated with the vagal-mediated experiences of unity and sacredness. These reflect positive core affect of love, peace, bliss, safety, emotional bonding, and gratitude that are engaged as an affective certainty about another dimension of reality rather than as a DMN narrative belief. Roles of the ACS in psychedelic effects are reflected in changes in affective tone, emotional regulation, and persisting changes in self-related processing. Psychedelic modulation of excitation–inhibition (E/I) balance operates through the ACS’s hierarchical regulatory architecture involving homeostatic–autonomic, limbic, salience-network, and cortical self-referential regulatory levels. A multilevel mechanistic explanation of psychedelic neuromodulation presented explains the psychedelic reorganization of affective tone and self-experience with a systems-level view linking 5HT-2A receptor activation and circuit activity to network reorganization producing changes in ACS dynamics. ACS roles in psychedelic dynamics involve bottom-up influences, a liberation of ACS signaling that provides input to a plasticity period to revise maladaptive priors embedded in autobiographical accounts and social-self dynamics, which can be selectively reshaped during integration following psychedelic-induced increases in plasticity. Spiritual, mystical, and psychedelic experiences produce the ascension and enhanced salience of the ACS and its basic feeling-states. These are based on evolutionarily ancient homeostatic and arousal/valence systems that provide primal valuations of safety versus threat through integration with limbic functions that make the information psychologically meaningful by connecting stimuli with associative memory. The ACS is a central integrative system through stabilizing E/I balance by integrating autonomic, interoceptive, and affective signals to modulate affective self-experience, functions that are augmented by effects of psychedelics. ACS dynamics feed-forward into the self-referential interpretation functions in the DMN, which integrates these feelings to provide reinterpretations of autobiographical memory and narrative identity.

Michael J. Winkelman, Ph.D. (University of California-Irvine) is retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Winkelman served as President of the Anthropology of Consciousness and Anthropology of Religion Section of the American Anthropological Association. Winkelman engages in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research on shamanism, psychedelics, and the alteration of consciousness. Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing [2nd ed., 2010] use cross-cultural and evolutionary methods to examine these ancient spiritual and ritual healing capacities. He co-edited Psychedelic Medicine (2007), Advances in Psychedelic Medicine (2019) and a Frontiers in Psychology special issue on Psychedelic Sociality, and a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies on Psychedelics in History and World Religions. He recently edited the Handbook of Entheogenic Healing (Brill, 2025). He served as an expert witness for Santo Daime in their defense against the US Department of Justice in 2009.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/CIV5YAFMCZHTTG67ZAAV?target=10.1111/gena.70005

2025 Shamanism and Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual, and Mystical Experiences,

in David Yaden, and Michiel van Elk (eds), The Oxford Handbook of

Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual, and Mystical Experiences. Oxford: Oxford

Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192844064.013.37,

2024 Neurophenomenology and Neuroepistemology Approaches to Integrating

Constructivist, Perennialist, and Universalist Perspectives on Mystical

Experiences”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 59(2), 382–409. doi:

https://doi.org/10.16995/zygon.11589

2021 The evolved psychology of psychedelic set and setting: Inferences regarding

the roles of shamanism and entheogenic ecopsychology. Frontiers in

Pharmacology 12, Article 619890. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.619890

2019 Introduction: Evidence for entheogen use in prehistory and world religions.

Journal of Psychedelic Studies Special Issue: Psychedelics in History and World

Religions Vol 3 43–62.

2018 An ontology of psychedelic entity experiences in evolutionary psychology

and neurophenomenology. Journal of Psychedelic Studies. 2(1): 5-23.

https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2018.002

2017 Mechanisms of psychedelic visionary experiences: Hypotheses from

evolutionary psychology. Front Neurosci. 11, article 539.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2017.00539

2022 Editorial: Psychedelic sociality: Pharmacological and extrapharmacological

perspectives. Frontiers in Pharmacology 13. DOI=10.3389/fphar.2022.979764

(with Roseman Leor, Preller Katrin H. , Fotiou Evgenia, Winkelman Michael

J.)

2021 Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution Front. Psychol., 29 September

2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425 (Arce, J.M.R. &

Winkelman, M.J.)