Our MOSAIC paper is out in @nconsc!
Turning first-person reports into interpretable phenomenological clusters using topic modelling and LLMs.

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed!

I would love to hear thoughts on where MOSAIC could be applied next, and which aspects could be improved / added into the pipeline !

8/ Beyond this study, MOSAIC is a general-purpose tool that can be applied to a wide range of phenomenological states, and aimed to keep being developed in the future.

7/ Key experiential topics included:
- Geometric and kaleidoscopic visuals
- Cosmic & dream-like journeys
- Meditative & peaceful states
- Multisensory integration with music
- Dissociation & out-of-body experiences

5/ Findings on SLS:
- As expected, experiential topics revealed Strobe-induced simple visual hallucinations (geometric and colorful patterns)
- More surprisingly, we also found complex hallucinations (scenes, objects, faces) and reports of altered states of consciousness (ASCs).

4/ This approach enabled structured analysis of phenomenological reports while reducing manual biases in labelling.

3/ Our goals were threefold:
1. Identify experiential topics in open-ended text-based reports of the Dreamachine (multi-sensorial) experience
2. Automatically generate meaningful labels using LLM
3. Provide a reusable computational framework for phenomenological research

Dreamachine | A new, one-of-a-kind immersive experience Dreamachine is an experience like no other. Join us on a magical journey through music and light to experience a colourful world unfolding behind your closed eyes, created by your own brain and comple...

2/ We applied MOSAIC to reports from participants in the Dreamachine (dreamachine.world), a collective experience using Stroboscopic Light Stimulations (SLS) and music

1/ In this paper, we introduce MOSAIC, a generalisable NLP pipeline for analysing phenomenological reports. It will be fully available on my GitHub shortly! If you can’t wait to check on the code, please contact me (r.beaut@sussex.ac.uk)

Mapping of Subjective Accounts into Interpreted Clusters (MOSAIC): Topic Modelling and LLM applied to Stroboscopic Phenomenology Stroboscopic light stimulation (SLS) on closed eyes typically induces simple visual hallucinations (VHs), characterised by vivid, geometric and colourful patterns. A dataset of 862 sentences, extracte...

My first PhD paper is finally out as a preprint!

Mapping of Subjective Accounts into Interpreted Clusters (MOSAIC): Topic Modelling and LLM applied to Stroboscopic Phenomenology

🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2502.18318

Thanks Johannes for this list ! Could you please add me ? Thanks ! :)