Background: Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a trauma-related condition characterized by pervasive disturbances in affect regulation, self-concept, and interpersonal functioning that extend beyond the symptom profile of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While neurobiological studies have implicated limbic, salience, and prefrontal systems in C-PTSD, mechanistic accounts...
Abstract Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved in a phenomenon known as ego dissolution (Nour et al., 2016). This is a case of transient disintegration of the self model caused by actions of serotonin 5HT2A agonists. Psychedelic experience provides a window on the nature of self...
Abstract In Cotard delusion, the subject believes that she has died or no longer exists. One explanation of the delusion proceeds from the fact that depersonalization is often reported as the experience of feeling ‘as if’ the subject no longer exists. In Cotard delusion, this depersonalization experience is coupled with a metacognitive deficit that leads the subject to endorse the experience or...
Abstract The self is an avatar, a virtual entity, constructed by the brain to play the game of life. To control the organism the mind manipulates the avatar through the world. The avatar co-ordinates bodily, perceptual, sensorimotor, cognitive, and metacognitive processes in pursuit of the organism’s goals, the most basic of which is homeostatic maintenance. Other processes are layered over...
Abstract A recent wave of research in psychiatry and neuroscience has re-examined the properties of ‘classic’ psychedelic substances—also known as serotonergic hallucinogens—such as psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Evidence to date suggests that psychedelics can be given safely in controlled conditions, at moderate to high doses, and may have...
Abstract The chapter undertakes three main tasks. The first is to review, briefly, the history of psychedelics in psychiatry, including the phenomenological and behavioural effects that first led to their being studied for therapeutic purposes. The second is to give an overview of recent research into the safety, efficacy, and therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The...
Abstract Daniel Dennett famously argued that the self is a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. In fact, the self is best thought of as a centre of interoceptive gravity whose homeostatic and affective experiences are subsequently interpreted and communicated in a narrative. This idea explains feelings of persistence and unity in the normal case and changed nature of self-awareness in psychedelic...
Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or 'I' distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved. Neuroscientific study of such 'ego dissolution' experiences offers a window onto the nature of self-awareness. We argue that ego dissolution is best explained by an account that explains self-awareness as resulting from the integrated...
Standard accounts of delusion explain them as responses to experience. Cognitive models of feature binding in the face recognition systems explain how experiences of mismatch between feelings of "familiarity" and faces can arise. Similar mismatches arise in phenomena such as déjà and jamais vu in which places and scenes are mismatched to feelings of familiarity. These cognitive models also...
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a newly recognized diagnosis that is distinguished from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through additional symptom clusters beyond re-experiencing, avoidance, and a persistent sense of threat. In addition to these core PTSD symptoms, C-PTSD is characterized by disturbances in self-organization, including affective dysregulation, negative...