Marc Wittmann

Marc Wittmann, Ph.D., studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich in Germany. He earned both his doctorate in 1997 and his habilitation in 2007 at the Institute of Medical Psychology at LMU Munich’s medical school. From 2000 to 2004, he led the Generation Research Program at LMU’s Human Science Center. He then served as a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, from 2004 to 2009. Since 2009, he has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany.

His work in cognitive neuroscience focuses on how time is perceived in altered states of consciousness, including those induced by meditation, the ganzfeld technique, Floatation-REST, and psychedelics. He also investigates non-ordinary experiences of a spiritual or anomalous nature as part of a broader effort to understand human consciousness. Supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, his research has demonstrated that neural processes in the insular cortex—linked to bodily signals, emotional states, and self-awareness—play a key role in generating the subjective experience of time. These findings were published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2013. He is the author of Felt Time (2016) and Altered States of Consciousness (2018), both published by MIT Press.