Michael Lifshitz

Michael Lifshitz is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He did his PhD in Neuroscience at McGill and then a postdoctoral fellowship in Anthropology at Stanford. His work combines phenomenology, neuroscience and ethnography to shed light on the plasticity of consciousness. He studies 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 like they are emerging from a source beyond the self.