Absorption in Schizophrenia, Music and Mystical Experience

Music is a medium that both as performed and as listened to can guide, strengthen, and expand our absorption. Expert musicians undergo intense and life-changing experiences of absorption in which the fundamental structures of consciousness are temporarily altered.

Contrarily, schizophrenia can be regarded a pathology of absorption. Here, immersion in common sense ¨C structuring large parts of our social life ¨C is experienced with a ¡°lack of natural self-evidence¡±, leading to an overthinking or ¡°hyper-reflection¡±, rather than an immediate absorption into these relations. If musical absorption is characterized by a strong and steady sense of time, schizophrenic experience is dominated by fragmentation and a lack of grounded connectivity.

This conference brings together internationally outstanding experts to explore:

I. What the study of musical absorption might bring to the understanding of schizophrenia.

II. How the pathology of schizophrenia might cast new light on the absorption made possible by musical experience.