Lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, and sleep-related out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are usually defined by a characteristic feature, although considerable phenomenological variability exists within each phenomenon. We explored how different experiential features were organized across participant-level profiles within these phenomena. Data came from an online survey completed by 389 adults who...
Single-item measures are increasingly used to capture constructs that are impractical to assess with multi-item scales, yet their reliability is difficult to estimate and validity evidence is rarely combined across sources. Meditation-related states, which are embodied and often hard to verbalize, illustrate this challenge. The aim of this study is to present a multi-source framework and apply...
Background: Subjective experiences featuring altered self-awareness, temporal perception, or spatial boundaries—termed Non-Ordinary Experiences (NOEs)—occur across clinical neurology, psychiatry, and psychedelic medicine, including in insular ecstatic seizures, meditation, breathwork, hypnosis, and psychedelic therapy. Objective: To synthesize neurobiological and clinical literature on NOEs for...
Much of our current understanding of inner speech – including much of what is presented in Kompa’s Language, Cognition, and the Way We Think – hinges on it being both pervasive in and important for cognition, with the two often being linked. As the argument goes: if inner speech is ubiquitous, it must be important, and if inner speech is important, everybody must have it. However, the...
Felt presence (FP), the sense that another agent is nearby without corresponding sensory evidence, occurs across neurological, psychiatric and non-clinical populations. Prior work links childhood imaginary companions (ICs) to anomalous and presence-related experience; we asked whether this link carries the spatial and perspectival signature predicted by a bodily self-consciousness (BSC)...
According to structuralist views of experience, red feels red because it feels closer to pink than to green. A conscious experience corresponds to a point in the phenomenal space, and its qualitative character is determined by the distances between that point and other experiences along the dimensions of the space. In this paper, we propose a new model divided into four claims. 1. The structure...
Free will is one of the most enduring problems in philosophy and cognitive science, yet what, exactly, requires explanation remains unclear. The most tractable target is the experience of free will – the vivid sense of self-authorship, control, and a felt capacity to have done otherwise. As with the scientific study of mystical experiences, this phenomenology can be investigated without...
Objectives. To characterize attentional experience, pulse rate variability (PRV), and interpersonal pulse-rate networks during the observational stage of Interoceptive Sensitivity for Attentional–Autonomic Alignment (ISAAA) training. Methods. In an uncontrolled five-day meditation camp, 48 participants provided linked pre- and post-camp questionnaires. Post-camp wrist photoplethysmography...
Objectives: To examine concurrent associations among cognitive-affective factors associated with psychological distress in young adults. Methods: Cross-sectional structural equation modelling was conducted in a community sample of 841 young adults aged 18 to 30 years. Psychological distress was specified as a latent factor indicated by depressive symptoms (PHQ-9), anxious symptoms (GAD-7), and...
Our minds are not always full of thoughts. Occasionally, people will report absence of any mental content, an experience termed mind-blanking (MB). So far, MB has been primarily quantified through experience-sampling paradigms. While experience-sampling has allowed researchers to study the behavioural and neurophysiological profile of MB, the practice of asking participants for thought...
The sense of self is fundamental to experience, yet its neural basis remains unresolved. Contemplative traditions and empirical evidence suggest it can be voluntarily dissolved while retaining awareness, offering a window onto this question. We combined magnetoencephalography with in-depth phenomenology in long-term meditators (N=45, mean 3,832 practice hours) who reliably modulated...
Background 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is associated with distinctive prosocial and empathogenic effects, yet the consistency and scope of its impact on social cognition in humans remain unclear. Although numerous placebo-controlled studies have examined MDMA’s acute social effects, findings vary widely across subjective and behavioural domains. Methods We conducted a systematic...
This study aims to obtain detailed information about the afterlife and how discarnate entities live there, using 37 different sources for the first time. These sources comprise seven selected participants claiming to be able to interview entities living in the afterlife, six participants claiming a direct experience of the afterlife, six experts on this topic, and books by 17 different authors...
Science uses objective measurements to falsify predictions, whereas consciousness is thought to be intrinsically personal and subjective. Consequently, behavioral measures of consciousness are often designated as “objective” or “subjective”. Surprisingly however, the exact meaning of the terms objective and subjective is not clearly defined. Moreover, applying this label to a given behavioral...
Research has typically examined how self-location in the head or heart is associated with traits and behavior, yet its link to relationality—specifically the felt sense of connection—remains underexplored. This study investigated how dispositional self-location predicts the embodied experience of being relationally linked to others and the world. We initially developed the Dispositional...
La Terapia Asistida por Psicodélicos (TAP) está emergiendo como un enfoque disruptivo para trastornos de salud mental complejos. Dado que el profesional de la salud mental (PSM) es el actor clave en su implementación, se ha estudiado sus actitudes hacia la TAP, pero falta profundizar la comprensión de los factores que afectan dicha actitud. El objetivo de esta revisión fue sintetizar la...
Background: Real-time fMRI neurofeedback (rt-fMRI NF) targeting ventral striatal (VS) cue reactivity has been proposed as a tool to support volitional self-regulation in individuals with problematic alcohol use, but training effects remain inconsistent. Regulation strategy is one potentially important but underexamined factor that may influence NF success. This pre-registered randomized,...
Evidence for a common metacognitive ability across cognitive domains remains mixed. Previous cross-domain studies have often used similar first- and second-order response formats across tasks, making it difficult to separate common metacognitive variance from common method variance. In addition, a reanalysis of the tasks used by Mazancieux et al. showed comparatively high performance and little...
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is widely described as an “empathogen”, yet empathy is not a unitary process. Here we review MDMA’s social effects by decomposing them into social perception and emotion discrimination, sociability and social reward, affective sharing, cognitive empathy and mentalizing, and prosocial behaviour. Available evidence gathered in humans and other mammals...
Abstract: Psychedelics have been used for spiritual purposes for centuries. However, concerns have been raised regarding spiritual bypassing, maladaptive meaning-making, and increased suggestibility when psychedelics are combined with religious or spiritual beliefs. We examined spiritual bypassing, receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit, subclinical psychotic experiences, well-being, and...
Background: Despite the rapid growth of psychedelic research, limited attention has been given to how psychedelics are used, experienced and integrated within highly conservative religious communities, and in Jewish contexts more broadly. This study addresses this gap by examining ayahuasca use among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, a highly religious, conservative, and collectivist...
Cognitive science is the scientific study of thinking. However, thinking in the colloquial sense of the term is conscious, attentive deliberation, and the vast majority of cognitive science is concerned with automatizable operations such as detecting stimuli, storing and retrieving information, and parsing sentences. This paper argues that cognitive science has lost sight of deliberative...
When something is plainly in view, are we always aware of seeing it, and is awareness always beneficial? We tested whether a clearly visible but task-irrelevant feature can fail to become reportable while still guiding behavior. Across four experiments (N = 584), participants viewed meaningful two-part objects under prolonged, unmasked exposure, with only one-part task-relevant. When...
Despite the widespread application of general anesthesia since the 19th century, a fundamental understanding of its operating principle and a reliable metric of consciousness remains elusive. We here analyze Loss of Responsiveness (LoR) induced by propofol anesthesia in humans and macaque monkeys. Through application of “highly comparable time series analysis” (hctsa) over 7000 features, we aim...
Insight, also referred to as the “Aha!” moment, is a distinctive cognitive phenomenon in which an idea or solution to a problem suddenly emerges into consciousness. Although extensively described in the literature, the nature of its distinctive cognitive and affective mechanisms is still poorly understood. In this paper, we formalize a computational approach to insight grounded in the active...