The study of animal consciousness has gained new prominence, driven by progress in neuroscience, cognitive ethology, and philosophy of mind (e.g., Andrews et al., 2024;Ehret and Romand, 2022;Bayne et al., 2024;Grinde, 2024). This special issue brings together diverse contributions (i.e., empirical, theoretical, and conceptual) that propose new ways to think about the nature and evolution of...
Near-death experiences (NDEs) including out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have been fascinating phenomena of perception both for affected persons and for communities in science and medicine. Modern progress in the recording of changing brain functions during the time between clinical death and brain death opened the perspective to address and understand the generation of NDEs in brain states of...
Awareness or consciousness in the context of stimulus perception can directly be assessed in well controlled test situations with humans via the persons' reports about their subjective experiences with the stimuli. Since we have no direct access to subjective experiences in animals, their possible awareness or consciousness in stimulus perception tasks has often been inferred from behavior and...