Temporal lobe lability in the highly transliminal mind

Abstract

Abstract Transliminality is “a hypothesized tendency for psychological material to cross thresholds into or out of consciousness,” which has been proposed to derive from hyperconnectivity between temporal-limbic structures and sensory association cortices. Accordingly, it might be expected that transliminality would positively correlate with temporal lobe lability. To test this hypothesis, 135 undergraduate psychology students at an Australian and a British university completed the Revised Transliminality Scale (Lange et al., 2000) and the Personal Philosophy Inventory (Persinger, 1984a), a validated measure of temporal lobe lability. As predicted, scores on transliminality showed a strong association with the general temporal lobe scale (r=0.72), as well as moderate correlations with a number of other scalar variables and individual items. The findings are consistent with the idea that transliminality is related to more ungated processing related to temporal lobe functioning, and furthermore that temporal lobe phenomenology promotes transliminal experiences with mystical or religious overtones.