Journal of Psychopharmacology
September 4, 2026
M. Nikolič, Tom Froese, Pedro A. M. Mediano et al.
Background: Psilocybin’s therapeutic potential is neurophysiologically characterized by acute alpha power reductions and increased entropy. However, the systematic time-course of these changes from administration through the 24-hour sub-acute phase remains poorly characterized. Methods: In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial ( N = 20, 10 females), healthy participants received a...
medRxiv
September 11, 2024
Marek Nikolič, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Tom Froese et al.
6 citations
preprint
Abstract Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic and a novel treatment for mood disorders. Psilocybin induces dose-dependent transient (4-6 hours) usually pleasant changes in perception, cognition, and emotion by non-selectively agonizing the 5-HT 2A receptors and negatively regulating serotonin reuptake, and long-term positive antidepressant effect on mood and well-being. Long-term effects are...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
March 27, 2024
Tom Froese
8 citations
Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind-body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
December 1, 2023
Tom Froese, John J Sykes
10 citations
Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (NP) — continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3)...
Entropy (Basel)
May 2, 2023
Tom Froese
Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent's motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
February 5, 2023
Tom Froese, Natalya Weber, Ivan Shpurov et al.
6 citations
preprint
The theory of autopoiesis has been influential in many areas of theoretical biology, especially in the fields of artificial life and origins of life. However, it has not managed to productively connect with mainstream biology, partly for theoretical reasons, but arguably mainly because deriving specific working hypotheses has been challenging. The theory has recently undergone significant...
Philosophies
April 21, 2022
Tom Froese
There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. (2) Psychology: the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution...
Frontiers in Pharmacology
December 3, 2020
Daniela Dudysová, Karolína Janků, Michal Šmotek et al.
37 citations
Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin’s antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of psilocybin on sleep architecture on the night after psilocybin administration. Regarding the potential antidepressant properties, we...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
A. Valencia, Tom Froese
Abstract The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cognition. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Tom Froese, Guillermo U Ortiz-Garin
Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond...
Philosophies
April 3, 2019
Tom Froese, Shigeru Taguchi
44 citations
In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically...
Frontiers in Psychology
February 26, 2019
Susana Ramírez–vizcaya, Tom Froese
105 citations
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Tom Froese
6 citations
Abstract Enactivists are searching for the conditions of genuine intersubjectivity. Theory of mind approaches to social cognition have come a long way from folk psychological theorizing by paying more attention to neuroscientific evidence and phenomenological insights. This has led to hybrid accounts that incorporate automatic processing and allow an instrumental role for perception and...
Adaptive Behavior
October 1, 2018
Ximena Gonzalez-Grandón, Tom Froese
25 citations
Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 25 years in the international arena. They have encouraged new ways to understand the mind. Mexico has not been an exception; rather, it has the potential to provide a fertile ground for the development of 4EC perspectives, as shown by the variety of contributions in this...
Adaptive Behavior
April 4, 2018
Tom Froese, Iwin Leenen, Tomáš Páleníček
8 citations
After a hiatus of several decades, there has been a resurgence of studies into the therapeutic potential of serotonergic psychedelics. When administered in controlled settings, they have been reported to induce a wide variety of long-lasting positive psychological changes. However, the mechanisms by which psychedelics impart these long-lasting benefits remain poorly understood. Here, we...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
2015
Tom Froese
14 citations
Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate perception, cognition, and emotion, which enactivism unifies in its foundational concept of sense-making; and both emphasize that the spatial extension of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 3, 2014
Cassandra Gould van Praag, Tom Froese, Adam B. Barrett et al.
29 citations
Investigation of synesthesia phenomenology in adults is needed to constrain accounts of developmental trajectories of this trait. We report an extended phenomenological investigation of sequence-space synesthesia in a single case (AB). We used the Elicitation Interview (EI) method to facilitate repeated exploration of AB's synesthetic experience. During an EI the subject's attention is...
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
May 8, 2013
Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, David A. Rosenblueth
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also...
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 8, 2013
Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, David A. Rosenblueth
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also...
IEEE Transactions on Haptics
October 27, 2011
Tom Froese, Marek Mcgann, William Bigge et al.
94 citations
The cognitive sciences are increasingly coming to terms with the embodied, embedded, extended, and experiential aspects of the mind. Exemplifying this shift, the enactive approach points to an essential role of goal-directed bodily activity in the generation of meaningful perceptual experience, i.e., sense-making. Here, building on recent insights into the transformative effects of practical...
Tom Froese
preprint
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a kind of linguistic competence that theories of embodied and enactive cognition have long deemed impossible for systems lacking the meaningful perspective of a living being, i.e. sense-making. Facing up to this unexpected development requires confronting this AI dilemma: either LLMs can be sense-makers in their own right despite lacking biological...