Consciousness is often treated as a property of the brain alone, yet accumulating evidence suggests that it is shaped by a recurrent dialogue between the brain and body. In this review, we discuss how cognition associated with consciousness-processes that define the observer, their observations, and arising qualia-depend on structured rhythmic correspondences between bodily rhythms and brain...
People with fantasy proneness and dispositions towards absorption and hypnotizability encounter waking thoughts that are particularly bizarre or dreamlike in nature. This suggests not only a continuity between dreaming and waking thoughts—what we refer to as continuity of thought—but perhaps stable individual differences in continuity of thought. The personality trait transliminality, which has...
Mindfulness meditation has drawn increasing attention in psychological research over the past two decades, including growing interest in its potential cognitive benefits. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that mindfulness training might improve cognitive performance, but the mechanisms underlying these benefits have not been fully characterised. In this Perspective, we integrate empirical and...
Asking participants to Think Aloud is a common method for studying conscious experience, but it remains unclear whether this approach alters thought qualities-such as meta-awareness, rate of topic shifts, or the content of thoughts in task-absent conditions. To investigate this, we conducted two studies comparing thinking aloud to thinking silently. In Study 1, 111 participants alternated...
While meditation research has primarily focused on mental health outcomes and immediate cognitive and affective benefits, little is known about its influence on higher-order beliefs, such as views on free will and personal agency. Despite substantial references to free will and related concepts in Buddhist philosophy, to our knowledge, there has been no empirical work investigating the...
This essay reviews the discrepancies between the phenomenal experience of time and the characterization of time as it is currently conceptualized by modern physics. Three aspects of the subjective quality of time are identified: (1) the present is privileged and distinct from the past and future in that it is the exclusive time at which observers experience events as happening; (2) time flows...
Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer...
Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast action under uncertainty. The mechanisms...
Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phenomenal/subjective experience) and also...
Background: Controversy surrounds psychedelics and their potential to boost creativity. To date, psychedelic studies lack a uniform conceptualization of creativity and methodologically rigorous designs. Aims: This study aimed at addressing previous issues by examining the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on creativity using multimodal tasks and multidimensional approaches. Methods:...
Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether real-time and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings. Consistent with recent work, we find a strong positive...
A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the...
Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in 'stimulus-independent thoughts' (SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate external environment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven by stimuli in one's external environment (i.e. stimulus-dependent thoughts; SDTs), at times, the phenomenology of these...
Digital mindfulness-based interventions (d-MBIs) present an unprecedented opportunity to share mindfulness training at scale. However, the feasibility of digital mindfulness training for high schools remains unknown. Using a one-group pre–post design, this feasibility study evaluated the adoption of a digital mindfulness course in a public high school. The 22-day course was delivered on...
Cognition is dynamic, allowing us the flexibility to shift focus from different aspects of the environment, or between internally- and externally-oriented trains of thought. Although we understand how individuals switch attention across different tasks, the neurocognitive processes that underpin the dynamics of less constrained elements of cognition are less well understood. To explore this...
Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense seems to have an integral relationship with consciousness itself. One of the possible "neural correlates of consciousness" in mammalian brains is a specific combination of gamma, beta and theta electrical synchrony. More broadly, we see similar kinds of resonance patterns in living and non-living...
During tasks that require continuous engagement, the mind alternates between mental states of focused attention and mind-wandering. Existing research has assessed the functional connectivity of intrinsic brain networks underlying the experience and training of these mental states using "static" approaches that assess connectivity across an entire task. To disentangle the different functional...
A broad set of brain regions has been associated with the experience and training of mindfulness. Many of these regions lie within key intrinsic brain networks, including the executive control, salience, and default networks. In this paper, we review the existing literature on the cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness through the lens of network science. We describe the characteristics of the...
It is challenging for individuals to maintain their attention on ongoing cognitive tasks without being distracted by task-unrelated thought. The wandering mind is thus a considerable obstacle when attention must be maintained over time. Mental training through meditation has been proposed as an effective method of attenuating the ebb and flow of attention to thoughts and feelings that distract...
Based on mixed results linking both mindfulness and its opposing construct mind wandering to enhanced creativity, we predicted that the relationship between mindfulness and creativity might depend on whether creative problems are approached through analytic strategy or through "insight" (i.e., sudden awareness of a solution). Study 1 investigated the relationship between trait mindfulness and...
Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in...
Contemplative mental practices aim to enable individuals to develop greater awareness of their own cognitive and affective states through repeated examination of first-person experience. Recent cross-sectional studies of long-term meditation practitioners suggest that the subjective reports of such individuals are better calibrated with objective indices; however, the impact of mental training...
The mind flows in a "stream of consciousness," which often neglects immediate sensory input in favor of focusing on intrinsic, self-generated thoughts or images. Although considerable research has documented the disruptive influences of task-unrelated thought for perceptual processing and task performance, the brain dynamics associated with these phenomena are not well understood. Here we...
Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one's ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness...