European Journal of Neuroscience
December 2, 2019
Constanza Baquedano, Vladimir Lopez, Diego Cosmelli et al.
8 citations
Awareness of mental events as mere representations rather than as accurate depictions of reality, also known as dereification, is one of the key features of mindfulness meditation. Dereification is juxtaposed to subjective realism, the process of being lost or totally immersed in the contents of one's mind. Excessive subjective realism is a hallmark of several psychiatric disorders. Here, we...
Scientific Reports
September 13, 2019
Catherine I. Andreu, Ismael Palacios, Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz et al.
Response inhibition - the ability to suppress inappropriate thoughts and actions - is a fundamental aspect of cognitive control. Recent research suggests that mental training by meditation may improve cognitive control. Yet, it is still unclear if and how, at the neural level, long-term meditation practice may affect (emotional) response inhibition. The present study aimed to address this...
Frontiers in Psychology
May 24, 2019
Alejandra Vasquez-Rosati, Rodrigo Montefusco-Siegmund, Vladimir Lopez et al.
Imagine a scenario where you are cooking and suddenly, the contents of the pot start to come out, and the oven bell rings. You would have to stop what you are doing and start responding to the changing demands, switching between different objects, operations and mental sets. This ability is known as cognitive flexibility. Now, add to this scenario a strong emotional atmosphere that invades you...
PLoS One
2018
Catherine I. Andreu, Diego Cosmelli, Heleen A. Slagter et al.
Research suggests that mindfulness-practices may aid smoking cessation. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying the effects of mindfulness-practices on smoking are unclear. Response inhibition is a main deficit in addiction, is associated with relapse, and could therefore be a candidate target for mindfulness-based practices. The current study hence investigated the effects of a brief...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Gonzalo Boncompte, Diego Cosmelli
The nature of the proper neural signature of conscious perception remains a topic of active debate. Theoretical support from integrative theories of consciousness is consistent with such signature being P3b, one of the main candidates in the literature. Recent work has also put forward a mid-latency and more localized component, the Visual Awareness Negativity (VAN), as a proper Neural...
Mindfulness
December 1, 2017
Catherine I. Andreu, Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz, Vladimir Lopez et al.
Performance monitoring—the ability to monitor ongoing performance to detect and correct errors—is a core component of cognitive control. Impairments in performance monitoring have been associated with several psychiatric disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and substance use disorder. Recent research indicates that the practice of meditation, as a mental training...
November 6, 2017
Evan Thompson, Diego Cosmelli
We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would...
Scientific Reports
October 17, 2017
Constanza Baquedano, Rodrigo C. Vergara, Vladimir Lopez et al.
34 citations
Immersing ourselves in food images can sometimes make it feel subjectively real, as if the actual food were right in front of us. Excessive self-immersion into mental content, however, is a hallmark of psychological distress, and of several psychiatric conditions. Being aware that imagined events are not necessarily an accurate depiction of reality is a key feature of psychotherapeutic...
The MIT Press eBooks
November 24, 2010
Diego J. Cosmelli, Evan T. Thompson
65 citations
This chapter discusses the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment and attempts to determine what needs to be specified so that one can properly imagine a brain in a vat. Daniel Dennett notes that philosophers often fail to set up their intuition pumps properly by failing to think carefully about the requirements and implications of their imagined scenarios. His suggestion is considered here and a...
Neuroimage
September 1, 2004
Diego Cosmelli, Olivier David, Jean-Philippe Lachaux et al.
We present here ongoing patterns of distributed brain synchronous activity that correlate with the spontaneous flow of perceptual dominance during binocular rivalry. Specific modulation of the magnetoencephalographic (MEG) response evoked during conscious perception of a frequency-tagged stimulus was evidenced throughout rivalry. Estimation of the underlying cortical sources revealed, in...
Biological research
2003
David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli et al.
194 citations
This paper reviews in detail Francisco Varela's work on subjectivity and consciousness in the biological sciences. His original approach to this "hard problem" presents a subjectivity that is radically intertwined with its biological and physical roots. It must be understood within the framework of his theory of a concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in his general theory of autonomous...
Diego Cosmelli, Evan Thompson
Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical,...