Drew Burney

researching where william james left off essentially he did pick up and it was in the 90s yeah he started getting interested in this he was at the university of new mexico in albuquerque and one of the first things he did was put an ad in the newspaper right for people basically if you've ever had one of these experiences where you've had this very fast sudden positive transformation we want to talk to you 55 people responded to this ad

in the paper came in and they interviewed them.

So there were people who had been terrible addicts before that all of a sudden the next day they weren't.

They were free of their addiction or severely depressed or something just terrible.

All of a sudden they just turned their life around in a day and started doing everything they needed to do.

What they found from this was kind of these basic characteristics of this experience that happened.

One of them was that it was sudden and very unexpected, just like James and all these other people found too.

Often literally overnight, you know, it could be maybe a couple of days or something like that, but usually, you know, minutes, hours, days at the most.

And the sudden rapid change like that profound generalized change to like you talked about with yours, like almost everything seemed to reorganize.

Right.

And that's everybody described that same thing, too.

Everything in my life just reorganized all of a sudden.

There's an enduring aspect to it as well.

It wasn't just that, oh, I felt this way for a couple of weeks and then it kind of petered out.

You know, like a lot of us, when we do try to change, that's what happens.

That wasn't the case for them.

Another important one too, they perceived that it was externally driven in a way.

It came from the outside.

This happened to them.

Everybody described that phenomenon.