Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Oskar Dragan, Anka Slana Ozimič et al.
8 citations
Working memory is usually measured with psychological tasks that focus on the reliability of outcomes rather than how participants experience the tasks. This study replicated protocols for investigating the lived experience of working memory using a visual span task. Eighteen healthy participants aged 21 to 35 provided subjective reports. Working memory was phenomenologically characterized at three time scales: background feelings, strategies, and tactics. At the level of tactics, transmodality—the transformation of one modality of lived experience into another—was identified as the central dynamic during task performance.
Asian Studies
August 10, 2016
Olga Markič, Urban Kordeš
5 citations
Mindfulness and first-person scientific approaches to consciousness research share conceptual frameworks that require careful examination to avoid misinterpretation when removed from their original contexts. The article identifies common problems including limited scope of insight, the subject-object split and excavation fallacy, challenges in researching everyday experience, and the issue of horizon. It also considers how research intention differs between science and Buddhism. The authors suggest that the two areas can mutually benefit one another: Buddhism may contribute ethical aspects to scientific research, while science may contribute open-endedness to Buddhism and other spiritual practices.
Frontiers in Psychiatry
January 20, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Marko Vrbnjak, Alina Holnthaner et al.
A single-case study of a 60-year-old man with bipolar disorder type I and suspected Asperger's syndrome traces how his autobiographical writings evolved from immediate self-description into a coherent, philosophy-like worldview. Emotional memories, regardless of factual accuracy, served as organizing phenomena that provided existential structure and meaning. The analysis integrates phenomenological, narratological, and linguistic frameworks to show how mood episodes influenced self-experience and identity coherence. The authors argue that cognitive schema theory is limited and that narrative scaffolding and affect-logic better explain worldview formation. They propose that multidisciplinary analysis of autobiographical narration can aid clinical assessment and intervention for complex, comorbid psychiatric disorders.
The MIT Press eBooks
December 16, 2025
Ema Demšar, Urban Kordeš
The author describes a personal meditation experience that revealed a rich, varied inner life—bodily sensations, images, and thoughts—that had previously gone unnoticed. This surprise at discovering such intimate yet overlooked experience motivates her interest in studying first-person, phenomenological methods. She argues that charting the diversity and complexity of people's experiential lives is critical for understanding human cognition, as current mind sciences collect extensive neurophysiological and behavioral data but often leave participants' actual lived experience undifferentiated or unknown. She contends that rigorous phenomenological methods are an important contribution to consciousness research and cognitive science, embracing rather than avoiding their epistemological and methodological challenges.
Frontiers in Psychiatry
January 1, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Sara Rigler, Nika Kovačič et al.
Ruminations are persistent, repetitive, distressing thoughts about negative events and moods, linked to psychiatric disorders and suicidality. This study provides a detailed description of ruminating from a lifeworld perspective, using micro-phenomenological interviews with 51 participants (107 interviews, 79 episodes). Ruminating is an epistemic practice driven by a need to resolve uncertainty after a collapse of commonsense understanding, leading to intellectualization and detachment from embodied responses. It involves paralysis, emptiness, and problematic relationships with knowledge. Rather than a maladaptive thought pattern, ruminating constitutes a complex lifeworld, suggesting a reconceptualization from a unified symptom to a system of interrelated altered experiences.
Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems
October 31, 2014
Ioana Laura Popa, Urban Kordeš
People construct their subjective experiences in at least three distinct ways, termed personal epistemologies, which correlate with their attitudes toward self-exploration. This finding emerged from research originally focused on Holotropic Breathwork experiences. The work offers a new model of experience construction and highlights limitations of phenomenological interview techniques.