PsyArXiv
July 27, 2025
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
preprint
Consciousness has long been a focus of philosophical inquiry. Philosophers have employedthoughts supported by language and logic as a primary tool to examine the essence andstructure of consciousness in mostly adult humans. Language elevates the abstraction ofthought and has significantly contributed to the advancement of civilization. Within an individual,language plays a significant role to...
PsyArXiv
July 23, 2025
Arie Todd Greenleaf
preprint
Plant cognition has progressed from anecdote to rigor, yet the field still lacks a quantitative test for when distributed plant activity crosses into unified—perhaps conscious—processing. I introduce Pattern–Temporal Synergy (PTS), a substrate-agnostic metric rooted in Dynergeia, a relation-first ontology that defines consciousness as reflexive coherence among five universal...
PsyArXiv
July 10, 2025
Roman Palitsky, Caroline Peacock, Jeffrey A. Breau et al.
preprint
Skilled interpersonal support and safety monitoring can enhance the therapeutic potential of psychedelic compounds and reduce the potential for harm. In the anticipation of legalized psychedelic care, and the recognition of ongoing psychedelic use across a variety of contexts, numerous training programs have been established to educate psychedelic facilitators in supporting individuals who take...
PsyArXiv
July 7, 2025
Johannes Kleiner
preprint
This paper presents a mathematical analysis of the logic of measuring Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs). Starting from the canonical definition of NCCs provided by Crick and Koch (1990) and Chalmers (2000), a series of lemmas and theorems are provided which show how NCCs can be discovered if empirical data about the co-activation of neural states and states of consciousness is...
PsyArXiv
July 5, 2025
Clement Abbatecola, Bernard Marius 'T Hart, Belen Maria Montabes de la Cruz et al.
preprint
We investigate the subjective experience of space around the visual blind spot area, the cortical representation of which is missing feedforward connectivity from one eye. We performed these experiments as part of an adversarial collaboration to test contrasting theories of consciousness; Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Predictive Processing Active Inference (AI), and Predictive Processing...
PsyArXiv
June 25, 2025
Philippe Servajean, Richard Servajean
preprint
When we say that a theory is able to account for our subjective experience, we simply mean that if this theory were true—e.g., if our brain were as this theory stipulates—then our subjective experience would be indeed as we experience it. A scientist would formulate this idea using the notions of observation and prediction: A theory is able to account for our subjective experience if and only...
PsyArXiv
June 19, 2025
preprint
Consciousness is traditionally viewed as a by-product of neurophysiological processes. This work proposes an alternative hypothesis: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain, but a manifestation of a universal spiritual field — the soul of the Universe. The study integrates concepts from quantum physics, information theory, phenomenology, and transpersonal psychology to offer a...
PsyArXiv
June 9, 2025
3 citations
preprint
Importance: Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) trials have high levels of functional unblinding. This effect positively biases results when PAT trials are compared against truly blinded trials. Objective: This pre-registered meta-analysis investigated the comparative efficacy of PAT and open-label traditional antidepressants (tAD; such as SSRIs and SNRIs) for the treatment of major depression....
PsyArXiv
June 3, 2025
Jan Marius Keppel Hesselink
preprint
The rainbow body (Jalü in Tibetan Buddhism) represents a profound spiritual attainment, and it is said that the physical form dissolves into light at the time of death. This paper proposes a novel hypothesis: the visual component of the rainbow body experience, as vividly perceived in personal meditative encounters, can be understood as a complex, dynamic phosphene-movie, a vivid internal...
PsyArXiv
May 27, 2025
preprint
Background: Fully decentralized self-administered mindfulness (SAM) interventions show promise for stress reduction, but rigorous evaluations of their feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness using both self-report and physiological measures remain limited. In Singapore, where mental health concerns rank as the top healthcare priority (46%), ahead of cancer (38%) and stress-related issues...
PsyArXiv
May 14, 2025
Francesco Bubbico, Teresa Fazia, Andrea Nova et al.
preprint
Mindfulness-based interventions improve psychological well-being but their effects on neurophysiological measures remain inconsistent. Traditional group-averaging approaches may overlook inter-individual variability, leaving doubts about if and how MBIs can influence one’s well-being. This study investigates the effect of Integral Meditation (IM) on behavioural and neurophysiological outcomes...
PsyArXiv
April 29, 2025
Francesco Ellia, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
preprint
This commentary engages with Fleming and Shea's (2024) recent work on computational functionalist theories of consciousness through a structural lens. We address three key aspects: the role of subjective experience in theory building, the hypothesis regarding local lateral connectivity in sensory areas, and the implications of "silent units" for consciousness. We argue that while their...
PsyArXiv
April 16, 2025
Luis Cásedas, Jonathan W. Schooler, Miguel A Vadillo et al.
preprint
Mindfulness meditation has drawn increasing attention in psychological research over the past two decades, including growing interest in its potential cognitive benefits. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that mindfulness training might improve cognitive performance, but the mechanisms underlying these benefits have not been fully characterised. In this Perspective, we integrate empirical and...
PsyArXiv
April 13, 2025
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Antonella Iadarola, Ramona Cordani et al.
1 citation
preprint
Unusual bodily experiences (UBEs) are illusory perceptions involving the body and its surroundings, such as body distortions and out-of-body experiences. This study examines UBEs in a controlled sleep laboratory using meditation and light stimulation to facilitate their occurrence. A total of N=35 healthy participants underwent high-density EEG with additional EMG, EOG, and ECG recordings....
PsyArXiv
April 12, 2025
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
preprint
The nature of the relationships between qualitative aspects of consciousness, or qualia, and their physical substrates remains unclear. The problem of qualia is one of the biggest challenges among the enigmas of consciousness. One difficulty in qualia research is characterization of qualia. Verbal descriptions and simple behavioral responses are unable to capture the richness of qualia, the...
PsyArXiv
March 21, 2025
preprint
This study examines how role clarity influences mindfulness, using data from 170 full-time employees. Structural Equation Modeling showed that role clarity significantly predicts mindfulness, even after accounting for prior mindfulness practice. By extending the Environmental Model of Mindfulness, this paper highlights the role of I/O psychology in advancing mindfulness research, with a focus...
PsyArXiv
March 14, 2025
Olga Ulkova, Johanna Prugger, Tim Hirschfeld et al.
preprint
The Open Data initiative Altered States Database (ASDB) collects psychometric questionnaire data on the subjective experiences of pharmacologically and non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness. The ASDB is updated annually and can be utilized by both researchers and non-scientists to access information or conduct further analyses. The current update adds data published in...
PsyArXiv
March 11, 2025
Eleftheria Pistolas, Boris Quétard, Sucharit Katyal et al.
preprint
A Ganzfeld is a homogeneous visual field, devoid of any focal points. Such a stimulus has been used by researchers to study perceptual phenomena in the absence of changes in sensory structure. Others have used it to study altered states of consciousness (ASCs). Until now, these different facets have been studied separately with little attention for the emotional subjective experience. This...
PsyArXiv
February 24, 2025
preprint
The science of consciousness requires multiple disciplines. There are complex philosophical questions that need to be understood, physical restrictions to consider, biological organisation that seems relevant to conscious beings, and phenomenological and psychological aspects that can not be studied under quantitative methods only. Today, however, scientific models of consciousness target a few...
PsyArXiv
February 3, 2025
Wolfgang Kromer
preprint
A COMMENTARY: Comparative integration and representation of information originating in one’s own body versus information originating in the environment is addressed as the basic nature of self-consciousness. Although the Integrated Information Theory justifiably refers to complex integration of information in neuronal circuits as a basis of consciousness, the crucial aspect of COMPARATIVE...
PsyArXiv
January 31, 2025
preprint
B-Man Stra/Tac Model of the Mind. Defining Consciousness
PsyArXiv
January 31, 2025
preprint
Examination of the subjective qualitative aspects of an experience, or ‘qualia’ in short, is a fundamental and core aspect of consciousness research. How can we characterize the particular quality of redness or a red quale? Based on a recent proposal of the structural characterization of qualia, which did not rely on verbal descriptions, we developed a task that obtained pairwise similarity...
PsyArXiv
January 22, 2025
Catherine M. Reason
preprint
This article suggests that the influence of philosophy of mind and metaphysics in the study of consciousness, has become excessive and is not well-founded. Metaphysical terms are often ill-defined and equivocal, and philosophy of mind relies largely on weak, concrete arguments which lack the power of more abstract mathematical formulations. An example is given of a mathematical argument, the...
PsyArXiv
January 5, 2025
Stefano Palminteri, Charley M Wu
preprint
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly become a central topic in AI and cognitive science, due to their unprecedented performance in a vast array of tasks. Indeed, some even see 'sparks of artificial general intelligence' in their apparently boundless faculty for conversation and reasoning, Their sophisticated emergent faculties, which were not initially anticipated by their designers, has...
PsyArXiv
January 3, 2025
John Howard
preprint
There has been a lack of success in locating the neural correlates of consciousness, not just in the complex brains of humans but also in animals with simpler brain structures. This paper considers whether the root of the problem is simply that we have been looking for the wrong thing. In contrast to most theories of the mind and consciousness, the B-Man Stra/Tac model proposes that...