Ten years ago, we published a position paper in this journal, criticizing reductionist claims of neurobiology related to mental disorders and important theoretical concepts like free will. Our interdisciplinary group of experts highlighted the need for and the challenges of integrating different approaches and system levels in neuroscience. We argued-and still argue-that such an integrative and...
If meditative practice can durably transform experience, and if phenomenology can refine how conscious experience becomes describable, then the interface between transformation and description becomes a shared research problem-philosophical, psychological, and methodological. Addressing it requires the traditions to move beyond conventional self-descriptions. Phenomenology is challenged to ask...
Mindfulness, meditation and yoga are very popular today. A large number of studies and meta-analyses have investigated the effectiveness of such practices for health, wellness and fitness. Yoga itself has repeatedly been described a science or science-based practice since the 20th century. This perspective addresses the question of the extent to which Western psychology and science are...
This chapter starts out with a theoretical discussion of the meaning of “drug”. As it turns out, three different kinds of psychoactive drugs can be distinguished. Central to this distinction is the understanding of appropriate medical use, which is subject to change. Historical examples illustrate how our personal and also governments’ ways to think about drugs changed since the nineteenth...
Langlitz and colleagues wrote about clinically used psychedelic drugs and the possibility of a “moral psychopharmacology” earlier in this journal (1). They emphasized the context-dependency of the effects of these substances (e.g., ayahuasca, psilocybin) and the importance of understanding their impact on social and moral cognition, particularly now that there is more research on their possible...
Finding a scientific, third-person explanation of subjective experience or phenomenal content is commonly called the "hard problem" of consciousness. There has recently been a surge in neuropsychological research on meditation in general and long-term meditators in particular. These experimental subjects are allegedly capable of generating a stable state of consciousness over a prolonged period...