Psychedelic substances like ayahuasca, psilocybin, and LSD have been used for thousands of years in spiritual ceremonies, with users often reporting transcendent and life-altering experiences. Chapter 8 traces the arc of psychedelic use from ancient rituals and colonization to the countercultural revolution and modern neuroscience labs. The chapter blends cultural history with psychopharmacology, showing how these compounds mimic serotonin and interact with the brain’s serotonin receptors to create altered states of consciousness. Citing research from neuroscience and psychology, the chapter considers how psychedelics affect the default mode network, ego, and self-referential processing. These effects can lead to feelings of oneness, ego death, and even reductions in depression and anxiety. The chapter asks whether the mystical states brought on by psychedelics are supernatural or simply deeply meaningful expressions of altered neural processing. Regardless, their potential therapeutic value, especially when guided in proper set and setting, positions psychedelics at the intersection of brain, mind, and meaning.

This chapter claims that because our bodies are fundamentally understood in terms of metaphor, metaphor might be everywhere.

The introduction outlines the main thesis that metaphor is not only for understanding abstract concepts but also for understanding human bodily experience. If the body itself is understood as metaphor, this gives a completely different view of how metaphor functions in thinking, language, and action.

Psychics, mediums, and fortune tellers may seem to possess supernatural insight, but many of their most impressive feats can be explained by the brain’s natural tendencies toward pattern recognition, suggestion, and belief confirmation. This chapter explores the psychological mechanisms behind psychic predictions, including confirmation bias, selective attention, and the Barnum effect. It also examines how experimenter bias and subtle behavioral cues can shape perceived psychic accuracy—even when no one is intentionally deceiving anyone. Using demonstrations from visual neuroscience, the chapter reveals how much information the brain fills in without our awareness. Alongside compelling case studies and historical context, readers are invited to consider how intuition, belief, and cognitive shortcuts can converge to create compelling—yet illusory—experiences. Whether or not psychic powers exist, the feeling of being seen or understood can be profoundly real, and this chapter examines how those feelings might arise from within.

The psychopathy literature on predictive validity tends to focus on a very narrow set of outcomes, namely, criminal behaviour. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between psychopathy and different social and health outcomes. In particular, I investigate whether psychopathy traits in adolescence reduce the likelihood of forming positive social bonds and engaging in social roles in adulthood. I also examine social outcomes in prison by focusing on the relationship between psychopathy traits in adulthood and criminogenic social networks in adulthood, including conflict in prison and elevated levels of criminal social capital. Finally, I also examine the relationship between psychopathy traits in adolescence and adult substance use issues and early mortality. In general, PCL:YV test scores increased the likelihood of negative social and health outcomes in adulthood. The findings highlight the potentially complex relationship between psychopathy, social/health outcomes, and continued offending. Framing psychopathy as a public health issue and not just a criminal legal system issue may be helpful for developing more proactive approaches to addressing psychopathy traits.

This chapter examines how metaphor unfolds through the operation of the entire body in communicative and cultural context.

Chapter 8 tackles the development an image can go through in its social life. This include processes of image circulation, virality, travel, and transformation, which have a significant influence on how meanings of images are negotiated and changed. Longitudinal research methods are presented and applied on the case example of news photographs.

The category of friendship called “friends and fun” popularized via gay sex/dating apps captures a pre-existing reality among queer people around the world: that friendships include a continuum of sexual, romantic, and sentimental affects and practices. In Beirut, this category takes on specific utility amidst power relations that define (un)acceptable ways for embodying intimate relations: it enables queer men to conceal their intimacies by adjusting their behaviors to suit the norms of male–male friendship. As queer men move their relationships from the privacy of the bedroom to the publicness of the street, they act like friends while holding contrasting sexual and romantic affects under the surface of these embodied practices. The chapter argues that “friends and fun” derives its meaning from the practices men undertake as an embodied response to the sexual and gendered exigencies of public space, thus showing how friendship practices and categories do not merely challenge, but also shore up power relations.

The conclusion discusses the implications of the claim that metaphor is fundamental for the understanding of our bodies, and what this means for theories of metaphor and the study of embodied metaphor in cognitive science.

Chapter 5 tackles the meanings and emotions an image can afford through its contents and form. The body of the image refers to the characteristics of the image, its visual features, pictorial composition, and material form, and how those together afford certain meanings and interpretations of the image in a specific moment in its life trajectory. The visual interpretation method is presented then applied on a case example of street poster images.

Chapter 1 starts with a discussion of the relevance of images to the displine of psychology, then it proceeds to a definition of some of the key terms of the book: public images, visual culture, visual/language distinctions, and the researcher’s viewing position.