PsyArXiv
November 26, 2025
Michele Farisco, Kathinka Evers, Jitka Annen et al.
preprint
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...
PsyArXiv
November 17, 2025
Elise G Rowe, Ken Takeda, Masafumi Oizumi et al.
preprint
The effects of top-down attention on perception have been intensively studied using binary categorization tasks (e.g., seen vs. unseen). However, such tasks poorly characterise the quality of experience, or qualia, for short. To characterise attentional effects on qualia, we combined a dual-task attention paradigm with similarity rating tasks to examine whether relational structures of qualia...
PsyArXiv
November 17, 2025
Ema Demšar, Mahdad Jafarzadeh Esfahani, Maša Rebernik et al.
preprint
Lucid dreaming (LD) – in which dreamers become aware that they are currently dreaming – has gained increasing attention in consciousness studies, yet its fine-grained experiential dynamics remain undercharacterized. We conducted in-depth micro-phenomenological interviews on 22 signal-verified lucid dreams experienced in a controlled sleep-laboratory setting, mapping within-episode dynamics from...
PsyArXiv
November 17, 2025
Jason Clarke
preprint
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and active inference unify perception, action, and learning within a single variational framework, yet they remain silent on why there is phenomenal experience at all. Awareness-First Theory (AFT) proposes an ontological inversion: rather than deriving consciousness from non-experiential dynamics, it takes awareness as ontologically primitive—taken as the base...
PsyArXiv
November 14, 2025
Masafumi Oizumi, Chanseok Lim, Ryota Kanai
preprint
Qualia, the subjective qualities of experience, pose a fundamental challenge to scientific explanation. A promising recent approach is to characterize qualia by their relational structures rather than their intrinsic nature. Assuming the structure of qualia is characterized by the geometry of neural representations, we posit that this geometry is fundamentally organized by symmetry. We propose...
PsyArXiv
November 14, 2025
Sabine Gnodde, Kengo Takahashi, Umberto Olcese
preprint
Research into the neural mechanisms of consciousness has so far mainly progressed through human neuroscience. However, most of the available techniques for use in human subjects lack the ability to probe the underlying neuron- and circuit-level mechanisms. Animal experiments offer a promising solution to these limitations. In particular, experiments in rodents allow us to combine large-scale...
PsyArXiv
November 11, 2025
Tate Pan, Jiaqiu Vince Sun, Xing Tian
preprint
Mindfulness practice is often described as yielding a “quieter mind,” yet the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying this experience remain understudied. This research investigates how focused attention (FA) meditation influences automatic semantic processing through a series of conflict-based tasks (e.g., Stroop). In a between-groups design, participants were randomly assigned to either...
PsyArXiv
November 11, 2025
Ylenia D'elia, Óscar Lecuona, Rocío Herrero et al.
preprint
Measuring subjective experience during meditation remains methodologically challenging due to reliance on verbal self-reports for embodied phenomena. To address this, we developed the Meditation Pictographic Scale (MPS) using a first-person phenomenological approach. We developed and validated the MPS across four phases: (1) qualitative interviews to refine pictographic items; (2)...
PsyArXiv
November 5, 2025
Arthur Hamilton
preprint
The relationship between schizophrenia and psychedelic drug states has long attracted scholarly interest and psychedelics have sometimes been described as psychotomimetic. Sense of self can be understood as the feeling of “mineness” that normally characterizes all experiences. In both schizophrenia and psychedelic experiences, alterations to sense of self are present and correlate with clinical...
PsyArXiv
November 2, 2025
Sebastian Ehmann, Nathan M. Hager, Paul S. Regier et al.
preprint
Background and AimsThe ongoing opioid epidemic remains a major public health crisis in the United States, with over 100,000 opioid-related deaths annually. Mental health disorders are strongly associated with opioid use disorder (OUD), compounding risks of misuse and overdose. Emerging evidence indicates that psychedelics may be associated with reduced risk of OUD. This study aimed to estimate...
PsyArXiv
October 27, 2025
JD Rolfes
preprint
Background: Psychedelic-assisted therapies show promise for MDD, PTSD, and addiction, yet mechanisms are often framed as 5-HT2A-centric, despite evidence of GABAergic pathology in these conditions.Hypothesis (Author Perspective): As a chemist examining psychedelic pharmacology, I propose that inhibitory-circuit modulation acts as a necessary systems-level gate converting transient 5-HT2A...
PsyArXiv
October 24, 2025
Ryota Kanai, Yuwei Sun, Manuel Baltieri
preprint
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have reignited questions about whether artificial systems possess consciousness. Yet, despite remarkable progress in reasoning and language understanding, current AI systems exist only within isolated episodes of computation. This paper argues that a missing ingredient in such systems is temporal continuity, i.e., the persistence of internal...
PsyArXiv
October 24, 2025
Barry Tse, Melody Jia-Qi Xu
preprint
MBCT combines ancient mindfulness practices with the structured approaches of modern CBT, creating an effective intervention for preventing depressive relapse and addressing a wide range of psychological conditions. The authors explore MBCT's development from its Eastern spiritual origins to its validation in Western clinical contexts. They discuss the dual theoretical frameworks underpinning...
PsyArXiv
October 24, 2025
Olivier Desmedt, Pierre Maurage, Mateo Leganes-Fonteneau et al.
preprint
Interoception, the processing of internal bodily states, contributes to human behaviour through multiple cognitive and affective processes, including emotional regulation and decision-making. It also constitutes a key variable in a range of psychopathological processes. Yet, its core phenomenological dimension, namely how bodily sensations are subjectively experienced, remains understudied....
PsyArXiv
October 23, 2025
James Thurbon, Paul F. Sowman, Vince Polito
preprint
Stroboscopic flashing light with white noise can induce a mild altered state of consciousness (ASC), with some effects similar to sensory deprivation and moderate doses of psychedelic substances. However, effective clinical utilisation of this white noise flicker light (WNFL) requires understanding the underlying mechanisms. Here, neural correlates and predictors of WNFL experience are explored...
PsyArXiv
October 8, 2025
preprint
Contemporary theories of consciousness offer a range of explanatory perspectives. Global Workspace Theory emphasizes cognitive access, Higher-Order Theories focus on metacognitive representation, Integrated Information Theory centers on intrinsic experience, and Predictive Coding Theory models cognitive processes as probabilistic inference. While each theory provides valuable insights, they...
PsyArXiv
October 2, 2025
Anna Paige Payton, Josephine R. Flohr, Boris D. Heifets et al.
preprint
Background and Aims: Understanding the factors that lead to participation in psychedelic clinical trials is essential for assessing potential biases in enrollment and ensuring the generalizability of findings. Psychedelic treatment is thought to impact personality traits, psychological flexibility, and expectations, however these non-pharmacological variables may also influence the initial...
PsyArXiv
September 30, 2025
Christopher Timmermann, Tommaso Barba, James W. Sanders et al.
preprint
Meditation and psychedelics have separately been studied as powerful tools for probing consciousness through their capacity to deconstruct the sense of self. Yet, direct empirical comparisons remain scarce, particularly in expert meditators. Here, we report for the first time a case study in which an advanced meditator and Lama from the Mahāmudrā meditation tradition engaged in a traditional...
PsyArXiv
September 30, 2025
Gandhimohan M. Viswanathan
preprint
Qualia—the first-person qualities of subjective experiences that constitute the “what it is like”of phenomenal consciousness—have thus far resisted physical explanation. Here we hypothesizethat qualia are generated in the brain during the quantum computational resolution of difficultinverse problems when non-Clifford magic states are consumed above a threshold rate. Magicstates are a well-known...
PsyArXiv
September 28, 2025
Jicheng Chen, Jia Jiangkun, Jia Ensuo et al.
preprint
Natural science is founded on materialism. We treat the independent relationship between inner experience and outer physical entities as an axiom. This cognitive paradigm has successfully explained many natural phenomena; however, certain phenomena, such as those in quantum mechanics and psychological experiments, challenge this view, suggesting the inseparability of the inner and outer. Yet,...
PsyArXiv
September 1, 2025
preprint
The Effects of RBD Medications on Dream Content: A Critical Review of Evidence
PsyArXiv
August 23, 2025
Andrey Kopnin
preprint
This paper presents a constitutive, emergentist-predictive account of qualiadesigned to address the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness within a naturalistic,physicalist framework. It argues that by integrating two leading paradigmsfrom cognitive science—Predictive Processing (PP) and Global Workspace Theory(GWT)—and grounding this synthesis in a consistent non-reductive (weak)emergentism, we can...
PsyArXiv
August 20, 2025
Deepanshu Tomar
preprint
The Bi-Interpretive Mind Framework (BIMF) introduces a dual-system model of human cognition and consciousness, positing the coexistence of two interdependent subsystems: the Primary Mind (logical, conscious, reality-testing) and the Secondary Mind (intuitive, unconscious, biologically interpretive). Subjective experience is conceptualized as emerging from the “interpretive handshake” between...
PsyArXiv
August 10, 2025
preprint
Dennett, Nonhuman Animals, and Consciousness
PsyArXiv
July 31, 2025
Jan Marius Keppel Hesselink
preprint
Phosphenes, the perception of light without external visual input, represent a rich intersection of neuroscience, subjective experience, and contemplative practice. While Heinrich Klüver's 1928 classification of four geometric "form constants" (lattices, cobwebs, tunnels, spirals) laid foundational groundwork for understanding these phenomena, it offers a limited scope for the diversity of...