Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2009
Charles D. Laughlin, C. Jason Throop
45 citations
The experience-reality gap—the difference between how the world appears and its underlying reality—is recognized across cultures, yet Western philosophy has long struggled to explain it. This article proposes an anthropologically informed cultural neurophenomenology as a way to bridge that gap. The approach combines phenomenology that accounts for cultural differences in perception and interpretation with neuroscientific findings about brain structure. The authors argue that this integrated perspective offers a generative route to understanding the relationship between consciousness and reality.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2012
Charles D. Laughlin, Vincenza A. Tiberia
34 citations
Carl Jung's work has had surprisingly little impact on the anthropology of consciousness, despite its relevance. This paper explains why that oversight occurred, summarizes Jung's archetypal psychology, and argues it is more nuanced and valuable than extreme constructivist perspectives allow. Jung's ideas about consciousness align well with contemporary neuroscience views of the psyche and offer a corrective to relativist understandings of consciousness and its relationship to the self.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 2017
Charles D. Laughlin
27 citations
As anthropology turns toward consciousness and its varied states, it needs a way to analyze the complexity of information processing that produces the knowing aspect of consciousness. The author introduces conceptual systems theory (CST), a neo-Piagetian model of cognitive development, as a tool for this purpose. CST has successfully explained information processing in social contexts but has been overlooked by anthropologists. The article discusses CST's neuroanthropological foundations and its potential applications to ethnological and ethnographic problems, offering a new framework for understanding how components of consciousness combine into alternative states across different sociocultural settings.
Culture & Psychology
September 1, 2006
Charles D. Laughlin, C. Jason Throop
21 citations
The longstanding debate between anthropologists and psychologists over nature versus nurture has been hampered by a mind-body schism. Anthropologists often assume culture replaced biology, while psychologists tend to ignore culture in favor of a naive scientism. Bridging this divide requires a language that can simultaneously address individual experience, culture, and extramental reality. The authors propose a cultural neurophenomenology and argue that the concept of 'information'—specifically Fisher information—provides a unifying framework. Fisher information allows modeling interactions among experience, culture, and reality in commensurable terms and suggests mechanisms by which individual psyche and societal culture remain 'trued-up' to reality and the individual's own being.
Time and Mind
January 1, 2011
Charles D. Laughlin
16 citations
Dreaming is the most common alternative state of consciousness, occurring during sleep in all normal humans. Despite its universality, dreaming remains mysterious and confusing for many Westerners while fascinating scientists studying mind and culture. The neuropsychology of dreaming is summarized, with emphasis on the importance of cross-cultural research. Examples of how different societies use dreaming are discussed. The author describes a phenomenological study of Tibetan Tantric dream yoga. Suggestions are made for improving anthropological study of dreaming, and the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in lucidity is emphasized.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 1995
Charles D. Laughlin, John Mcmanus
12 citations
William James's lesser-known methodology, radical empiricism, demands that all scientific ideas be grounded in direct experience and that no experience be excluded from scientific inquiry. This paper outlines James's thoughts on radical empiricism, evaluates its strengths and problems in light of contemporary science, and offers a biogenetic structural elaboration of his concepts of relations and pure experience. This elaboration counters Jacques Derrida's post-structuralist critique. The relevance of James's views to the anthropology of consciousness is explored, emphasizing the necessity—anticipated by James—of merging phenomenology with structuralism.
Time and Mind
July 3, 2018
Charles D. Laughlin
7 citations
Meditation is defined in neuropsychological terms that allow it to be studied across cultures, not only in East Asian yogic traditions. Anthropologists find that meditation on culturally salient symbols is widespread in spiritual rituals worldwide and likely dates to the Paleolithic as one of the earliest religious practices. All meditation systems are embedded in a cycle of meaning that evokes spiritual experiences, anticipates them through ritually controlled volition, and provides culturally appropriate interpretations. This cultural–phenomenological interaction distinguishes societies with meditation cultures from those without. Examples examined include prayer, dream yoga, shamanic journeying, trance dancing, and visualization in healing.
Anthropology of Consciousness
July 1, 1992
Charles D. Laughlin
6 citations
This paper argues that Husserl's transcendental phenomenology has a systematic bias favoring intuition of essences of meaning over intuition of essences of sensation, a bias rooted in his mind-body dualism. It proposes a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural perspective that merges knowledge of essences from contemplation with knowledge of experience from neuroanthropology. The author describes the sensorium and the constituent element of perception, the dot, hypothesizing that experience arises from dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, with experience constituted within a field of dots arising and dissolving in temporal frames. Husserl's view of time phenomenology is deemed essentially correct and compatible with neurophysiology, modern science, and religious traditions encountered by ethnographers.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
January 1, 2013
Charles D. Laughlin
5 citations
Dreams are experienced as real across cultures, and the ways people interpret and use them vary. The text introduces dream anthropology, showing universal patterns in how societies experience, express, and use dreams. It distinguishes monophasic cultures (which treat waking reality as primary) from polyphasic cultures (the majority, which consider dreams real). Neuroscience supports a natural realism behind experiences in alternative states of consciousness, suggesting a transcendental set of constraints and possibilities that shape how experiences, especially archetypal dreams, are modeled, expressed, and socially interpreted.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
January 1, 2001
Charles D. Laughlin
2 citations
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Humans
February 17, 2024
Charles D. Laughlin
1 citation
Anthropology has historically avoided becoming a nomothetic science, missing chances to build empirical theoretical constructs and instead retreating into a natural history of sociocultural differences. This paper argues for methods that focus the ethnographic gaze on essential structures of perception alongside cultural variation. The anthropology of experience and the senses can incorporate a partnership between Husserlian phenomenology and neuroscience to evidence essential structures of consciousness and the neurobiological processes that present the world as adaptively real. Combining essences—sensory objects, relations, horizons, and intuitions—with the search for neural correlates of consciousness can augment traditional ethnography and counter the constructivist bias that reduces everything to culture.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 2023
Charles D. Laughlin
1 citation
Husserlian phenomenology offers a methodological approach to social consciousness that aligns with neuroscientific research on neural correlates of consciousness, particularly in the post-neuro-turn social science era. By emphasizing "returning to the things," performing reductions, and developing the phenomenological attitude, this approach allows anthropology to explore consciousness cross-culturally with greater depth, especially regarding intersubjectivity. The roots of intersubjectivity are found within the inherent life-world that all normal humans rely on to validate their experiences, regardless of cultural background. This challenges anthropology to move beyond the nature-nurture distinction and the assumption that human experience is entirely culturally constructed.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 2020
Charles D. Laughlin, Melanie Takahashi
Mystical experiences are altered states of consciousness opposite to everyday ego-centered awareness, and a key factor in them is what the authors term 'mystical love.' Humans appear to have a need to alter consciousness away from ordinary waking states. Ritual practices across cultures—such as ingesting psychotropic substances, daily activities that devalue ego-centeredness and promote love and selfless service, and meditation on loving kindness and compassion—are used to incubate intense feelings of non-romantic love, empathy, and compassion, preparing individuals for mystical experiences whose results are interpreted within each person's cycle of meaning.