Abstract In recent decades, the psychedelic psilocybin has been studied as a potential treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD), offering an alternative to traditional antidepressants. However, the brain changes underlying the clinical effects of different interventions remain unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of psilocybin and a conventional antidepressant, escitalopram, from the...
Significant advances in the scientific investigation of the neurobiology of consciousness have been slow to be translated into clinical settings, limited by factors of conceptual (e.g., what is consciousness?), methodological (e.g., how to identify reliable indicators of consciousness?), and technical (e.g., how to improve sensitivity and specificity of the technological identification of...
The Thoughtseeds Framework introduces a novel computational approach to modeling thought dynamics in meditative states, conceptualizing thoughtseeds as dynamic attentional agents that integrate information. This hierarchical model, structured as nested Markov blankets, comprises three interconnected levels: (i) knowledge domains as information repositories, (ii) the Thoughtseed Network where...
The emergence of cognition requires a framework that bridges evolutionary principles with neurocomputational mechanisms. This paper introduces the novel "thoughtseed" framework, proposing that cognition arises from the dynamic interaction of self-organizing units of embodied knowledge called "thoughtseeds" within the Global Workspace of consciousness. Leveraging foundational concepts from...
During the sleep-wake cycle, the brain undergoes profound dynamical changes, which manifest subjectively as transitions between conscious experience and unconsciousness. Yet, neurophysiological signatures that can objectively distinguish different consciousness states based are scarce. Here, we show that differences in the level of brain-wide signals can reliably distinguish different stages of...
The emergence of cognition requires a framework that bridges evolutionary principles with neuro-computational mechanisms. This paper introduces the novel “thoughtseed” framework, proposing that cognition arises from dynamic interactions of self-organizing units of embodied knowledge called “thoughtseeds” within the Global Workspace of consciousness. By leveraging evolutionary theory, neuronal...