Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology
January 10, 2023
Amnon Dafni-Merom, Shahar Arzy
Philosophical theories have attempted to shed light on the intricate relationships between consciousness and memory since long before this became a major theme in psychology and neuroscience. In the December 2022 issue of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, Budson, Richman, and Kensinger (2022) introduced a comprehensive theoretical framework pertaining to the origins of consciousness in...
Neuropsychologia
April 30, 2020
Amnon Dafni-Merom, Shahar Arzy
One of Endel Tulving's most important contributions to memory research is the coupling of self-knowing consciousness (or "autonoesis") with episodic memory. According to Tulving, autonoetic episodic memory enables the uniquely human neurocognitive operation of "mental time travel", which is the ability to deliberately "project" oneself to a specific time and place to remember personally...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 4, 2019
Shahar Arzy, Daniel L Schacter
The concepts of agency of one's actions and ownership of one's experience have proved useful in relating body representations to bodily consciousness. Here we apply these concepts to cognitive maps. Agency is defined as 'the sense that I am the one who is generating the experience represented on a cognitive map', while ownership is defined as 'the sense that I am the one who is undergoing an...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2017
Judith Katz, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Shahar Arzy
The life-review experience (LRE) is a most intriguing mental phenomenon that fascinated humans from time immemorial. In LRE one sees vividly a succession of one's own life-events. While reports of LRE are abundant in the medical, psychological and popular literature, not much is known about LRE's cognitive and psychological basis. Moreover, while LRE is known as part of the phenomenology of...
Epilepsy & Behavior
May 10, 2016
Shahar Arzy, Roey Schurr
Religious experiences have long been documented in patients with epilepsy, though their exact underlying neural mechanisms are still unclear. Here, we had the rare opportunity to record a delusional religious conversion in real time in a patient with right temporal lobe epilepsy undergoing continuous video-EEG. In this patient, a messianic revelation experience occurred several hours after a...
October 1, 2005
Shahar Arzy, Théodor Landis, Olaf Blanke
Under normal conditions, human subjects experience the self within the limits of the physical body and the limits of the present time. This unified experience of the self in space and time has been challenged by philosophers and physicists. The spatial unity between self and body has also been challenged by a well defined group of experiences called “autoscopic phenomena” (AP), during which...
The Neuroscientist
January 4, 2005
Olaf Blanke, Shahar Arzy
468 citations
Folk psychology postulates a spatial unity of self and body, a "real me" that resides in one's body and is the subject of experience. The spatial unity of self and body has been challenged by various philosophical considerations but also by several phenomena, perhaps most notoriously the "out-of-body experience" (OBE) during which one's visuo-spatial perspective and one's self are experienced...
Medical Hypotheses
2005
Shahar Arzy, Moshé Idel, Théodor Landis et al.
The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary...