Michael Lifshitz

Michael Lifshitz is an Assistant Professor working in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He did his doctorate in neuroscience at McGill and then a postdoc in anthropology at Stanford, where he worked with Tanya Luhrmann to study how culture shapes spiritual experience. He now co-directs the Psychedelics and Contemplation Lab, an interdisciplinary research space that combines phenomenology, neuroscience and ethnography to shed light on the plasticity of consciousness. His research focuses on practices that aim to transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and psychedelics. He is particularly interested in how these practices can modulate feelings of agency, so that thoughts, actions and sensations can come to feel as if they are emerging from a source beyond the self.