The relationship between attention and consciousness has been debated for decades. Observing attentional biases induced by visual stimuli below the conscious threshold is one way of providing evidence for the independence of attention and conscious perception. Among such studies, Jiang et al. (2006) found a strong priming effect below the objective conscious threshold with high sensitivity, in...
Letter in reply to Robison R, Barrow R, Conant C, et al. Single Treatment With MM120 (Lysergide) in Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2025;doi:10.1001/jama.2025.13481 (unpublished, rejected by the journal)
Scientific theories aim to explain and predict phenomena, yet assessing how experimental evidence impacts a theory remains a significant challenge. This is particularly evident in the psychological and cognitive sciences, where a lack of formal models and precise quantitative predictions often obscures the "centrality" of a given hypothesis for the theory that generates it. Because auxiliary...
Objectives: Mindfulness is consistently linked with individual well-being and relationship functioning, yet it remains unclear systemically whether mindfulness reliably “crosses over” within romantic couples — such that one partner’s mindfulness is associated with other partner’s outcomes after accounting for dyadic interdependence. We conducted a model-testing meta-analysis (MTMA) based on the...
The review article Theoretical strategies for an embodied cognitive neuroscience (Mougenot & Matheson, 2024) proposes that the embodied cognition framework can be applied to develop mechanistic explanations for cognitive neuroscience phenomena. In our commentary we argue that any mechanistic explanation of such phenomena must be able to account for individual differences in cognition that are...
Computational phenomenology has emerged as a powerful framework for investigating advanced meditation states and stages, and meditative development and endpoints. Various models have been proposed to mechanistically explain the diverse experiences associated with these practices, including enhanced well-being, attentional shifts, and defabrication, as well as minimal phenomenal experiences and...
This paper examines the visionary experiences of Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) as described in The Life of Teresa of Jesus, through the lens of contemporary phenomenology and the six-phase taxonomy of meditation-induced phosphenes. Special attention is given to Chapters 27–38, including her iconic vision of pure inner light and the Transverberation experience. We argue that Teresa’s...
Dissociative experiences are prevalent in young people, where they are associated with greater clinical severity of co-occurring difficulties and increased risk of self-harm and suicide. Recent research suggests transdiagnostic dissociation plays a role in the development and maintenance of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and psychosis, and may therefore constitute a novel...
Quality spaces promise to represent mental qualities objectively. That objectivity is compromised, however, if quality spaces are constructed by subjective introspective access, which is impressionistic. But mental qualities also have a robust and objective connection to perceptual discrimination. So quality spaces can be constructed in a fully objective way by appeal to their role in...
We introduce Λ3 Theory, a new mathematical and topological framework that reconceptualizes emotion, qualia, and sentient experience as nonlinear branching phenomena within a multidimen- sional tensor manifold. Moving beyond traditional binary classifications of affect (e.g., positive/neg- ative, good/bad) and static emotional labels, Λ3 Theory employs tensorial subjectivity to model the...
This paper explores an alternative model of consciousness—the B-Man Stra/Tac model—which challenges the dominant view that consciousness emerges from complex brain activity. Drawing on the philosophical arguments of (Nagel, 1974) and theoretical considerations inspired by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as interpreted by Penrose (Howard, 2025c), this model proposes that consciousness resides in...
Full text (opens in new tab)B-man stra/tacDynamic algorithms/consciousness systemTheory of consciousnessConsciousness theory+4
The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) has long served as a paradigm for understanding multisensory integration and body ownership. Traditional interpretations emphasize neural mechanisms and cognitive suggestibility, but they fall short of identifying the illusion’s fundamental cause. This paper proposes the Soul-Drift Hypothesis (SDH), a novel conceptual framework that attributes the RHI not to...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals experience disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, and discrimination, yet remain underrepresented in psychedelic research. This prospective, naturalistic study explored the impact of an ayahuasca retreat experience on mental health, quality of life, and spiritual well-being among SGM participants. Nineteen individuals attending...
Most people can conjure images and sounds that they experience in their minds. There are, however, marked individual differences. Some people report that they cannot generate imagined sensory experiences at all (aphantasics) and others report that they have unusually intense imagined experiences (hyper-phantasics). These individual differences have been linked to activity in sensory brain...
Dissociation is a phenomenon characterised by a disconnection or detachment from one’s thoughts, identity, consciousness, or surroundings, and can manifest in various psychiatric disorders. Existing measures of dissociation vary considerably in quality and psychometric properties. A comprehensive systematic review of these measures is lacking. This review aimed to assess the psychometric...
With incredible speed Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping many aspects of society. This has been met with unease by the public, and public discourse is rife with questions about whether LLMs are or might be conscious. Because there is widespread disagreement about consciousness between scientists, any concrete answers we could offer the public would be contentious. Here we offer the next...
The phenomenon of aesthetic chills—shivers and goosebumps associated with either rewarding or threatening stimuli—offers a unique window into the brain basis of conscious reward due to their universal nature and simultaneous subjective and physical counterparts. Elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying aesthetic chills can reveal fundamental insights about emotion, consciousness, and the...
[Final version available as Open Access PDF from MIT Press: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5897/A-Drive-to-SurviveThe-Free-Energy-Principle-and] The Free Energy Principle proposes to reduce the goal-directed behaviour of a living agent to the preservation of homeostasis and then to analyse cognition as the process of pursuing this goal. I argue that this stability-based account fails...
A short and informal essay considering the significance of music or musical melodies. Music is considered as being equivalent to a fundamental encoding of change in a digital universe. Consciousness is also proposed as being what it feels like to have dopamine levels change in an organic brain. Consciousness is considered as emergent from an agent with sufficient memory and context or a...
The aim of this study was to explore if a conservative response criterion is responsible for non-conscious perception of facial expressions during continuous flash suppression (CFS). We hypothesized that participants’ sensitivity in a detection task would be significantly lower than their sensitivity in a 2-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task while using CFS. After rendering images of faces...
Notice: a peer-reviewed version of this preprint has been published in Behavior Research Methods and is available freely at http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1162-0 Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) is a popular method for suppressing visual stimuli from awareness for relatively long periods. Thus far, it has only been used for suppressing two-dimensional images presented...
We conducted an exploratory study of adult individual differences in the contents of mind-wandering experiences and in the moment-to-moment consistency of that off-task thought content within tasks. This secondary analysis of a published dataset (Kane et al., 2016) examined the content-based thought reports that 472-541 undergraduates made within five probed tasks across three sessions, and...
At the start of his final book, James Gibson makes a distinction between two different senses in which there is a world outside the animal. First, there is a physical world consisting of matter which is structured prior to any animal's experiencing it. Second, there is the animal environment, where the "environment" is what surrounds a living animal, the two terms making up a complementary and...