Consciousness and Cognition
July 8, 2017
Charlotte Martial, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Héléna Cassol et al.
24 citations
Memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) are detailed and stable over time, yet their rich phenomenology lacks a satisfactory explanation. In 152 individuals who reported a classical NDE during life-threatening conditions, the intensity of the NDE was positively correlated with phenomenological characteristics of the memory, such as sensory details, personal importance, and frequency of reactivation. Those who described more intense NDEs also reported more vivid and detailed memories of the event.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2020
Jarrod Gott, Michael Rak, Leonore Bovy et al.
23 citations
Lucid dreaming, where people experience waking-like self-reflection during dreams, is linked to more wake-like brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. This multi-centre study, combining four investigations, examined whether fragmented sleep increases the chance of lucid dreaming. Results showed that self-reported awakenings, polyphasic sleep schedules, and physiologically measured wake-REM sleep transitions were associated with lucid dreaming. However, neither self-assessed sleep quality nor physiologically measured numbers of awakenings showed an association. The findings suggest a nuanced relationship, where certain types of sleep fragmentation, but not all, may relate to lucid dreaming, and the authors discuss possible causal mechanisms.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2015
John M De Castro
23 citations
People who engage in meditation, yoga, or contemplative prayer—alone or in combination—report greater mindfulness, kundalini effects, and mystical experiences. The amount of time spent practicing, rather than the specific pattern or social setting, appears to drive these benefits. Meditation shows the strongest links to these outcomes and may underlie the associations seen with yoga and prayer. The findings suggest that contemplative practices primarily enhance real-time awareness and appreciation of sensory and perceptual experiences, which may serve as a bridge between different practices and the observed improvements in mindfulness, kundalini effects, and mystical experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2024
Jarrod Gott, Sina Stücker, Philipp Kanske et al.
22 citations
Acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in cognition and REM sleep regulation, may play a role in lucid dreaming—a state where metacognitive awareness returns during sleep. Recent studies using acetylcholinesterase inhibitors suggest a link, but the causal mechanisms remain unknown. This review examines theories connecting acetylcholine and metacognition across wakefulness and sleep, analyzing the phenomenon at microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic levels. It develops exploratory hypotheses to guide future research on how acetylcholine receptor activity affects metacognition.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2020
Timothy Joseph Lane
22 citations
The concept of a minimal self (MS), understood as the sheer sense of 'for-me-ness' of experience, has long been considered necessary for consciousness but lacked empirical support. Recent discovery of the brain's Default Mode Network (DMN) provides a starting point for neuroimaging investigations of MS. New experimental protocols targeting states where consciousness is lost and recovered—such as Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, NREM sleep, and general anesthesia—offer evidence that self and consciousness can dissociate, and that MS might be a necessary precondition for conscious experience. These findings also suggest that the concept of 'levels of consciousness' may have a legitimate role in a mature science of consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2012
Brian Talbot
21 citations
Folk intuitions about mental states, often used by philosophers to study qualia and phenomenal consciousness, do not actually provide reliable data about these subjects. The paper argues that judgments in experiments by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery are likely produced by a fast, automatic cognitive system (System One) that would yield the same results regardless of whether phenomenal consciousness exists. This undermines much current experimental philosophy research into consciousness. To meaningfully investigate phenomenal consciousness, experimental philosophy must be grounded in a better understanding of how people make judgments.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Cloé Blanchette-Carrière, Sarah-Hélène Julien, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
20 citations
The neurophysiological basis of self-awareness during sleep (lucid dreaming) is still poorly understood. Previous work suggested that transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) during sleep could increase dream self-awareness, but methodological flaws in those studies motivated a new investigation. In the current study, both tACS and a sham procedure were associated with signal-verified and self-rated lucid dreams, indicating that situational factors, rather than the stimulation itself, may be critical for inducing self-awareness during sleep.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2004
L Andrew Coward, Ron Sun
20 citations
A rigorous scientific theory of consciousness requires a modular hierarchy of descriptions, similar to that used in electronic systems, where causal relationships at a phenomenological level are derived from simpler entities at more detailed levels. The causal relationships defining access and phenomenal consciousness are made explicit and linked to perception, memory, and skill learning. Extending these to physiological and neural levels is discussed. The capability of current consciousness models to support such a hierarchy is reviewed, with two models compared in detail.
Consciousness and Cognition
April 1, 2019
Alan Jurgens, Michael D Kirchhoff
18 citations
The paper argues against the cognitivist view that social cognition is realized solely inside the head. It develops an enactive account in which embodied, face-to-face interaction plays a constitutive, not merely causal, role in social understanding. The authors first explain how diachronic embodied engagement can constitute social cognition. They then refute the causal-constitutive fallacy objection by showing that the constitution–causation distinction does not map onto an internal–external divide. A second objection—the poverty of the interactional stimulus argument—claims that anticipation requires an internal model or tacit theory. The paper dissolves this by proposing that anticipatory processes can be orchestrated and maintained by sensorimotor couplings between interacting individuals.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2022
Benjamin Baird, Mariel Kalkach Aparicio, Tariq Alauddin et al.
17 citations
Spontaneous episodic thoughts about the past and future are common during waking but rarely occur during N2 or REM sleep. Analysis of thought reports from 138 participants who underwent experience-sampling while awake and serial awakenings during sleep shows that waking spontaneous thought frequently includes autobiographical planning with a strong bias toward the future. In contrast, dreaming sleep states rarely feature such mental time travel. This suggests that human consciousness differs substantially across the sleep-wake cycle in how it typically engages with episodic past and future events.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2023
Fiona G. Sleight, Steven Jay Lynn, Richard E. Mattson et al.
16 citations
A new 10-item Ego Dissolution Scale (EDS) reliably measures trait-like tendencies toward losing one's sense of self and experiencing unity, with internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.80) and subfactors for Ego-Loss (α = 0.84) and Unity (α = 0.75). The scale shows strong convergent validity with depersonalization, derealization, mysticism, and unusual experiences, and discriminant validity against neuroticism and social desirability. Ego dissolution and dissociation are empirically related but statistically distinguishable.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2021
Tim Julian Möller, Yasmin Kim Georgie, Guido Schillaci et al.
16 citations
Self-disorders are increasingly seen as the root cause of schizophrenia, not merely a symptom. This aligns with philosophical views of an enactive self, formed through action and interaction. The authors analyze definitions of the self and evaluate computational theories, particularly Bayesian and predictive processing approaches, for modeling the active self. They assess the implementation and challenges of these models in computational psychiatry and cognitive developmental robotics. Embodied robotic systems are described as valuable tools for assessing, validating, and simulating mechanisms of self-disorders, especially those involving sensorimotor learning, prediction, and self-other distinction. This link offers insights into self-formation and new avenues for treating psychiatric disorders.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
E G Milán, O Iborra, M Hochel et al.
15 citations
Some synaesthetes see colors triggered by emotionally charged stimuli such as familiar faces. One participant, R, describes seeing a human silhouette filled with color when viewing a familiar person. These subjective reports resemble descriptions of seeing auras. The authors analyze reports from four synaesthetes who experience colors in response to faces and figures, comparing them with descriptions of auras from esoteric literature. The discrepancies indicate that synaesthetic face-color perception and claimed auric perception are phenomenologically and behaviorally different.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 1998
J G Taylor
15 citations
A theoretical paper examines how certain neural network features in the cerebral cortex might help bridge the explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness and correlated brain activity. The authors propose criteria that neural activity must meet to be associated with phenomenal consciousness, review various neural processing styles, and identify one style—semiautonomous, long-lasting cortical activity "bubbles" triggered by input—as the best fit. Further experimental criteria narrow the candidate neural models, leading to a specific class of models and a set of testable predictions about the neural underpinnings of phenomenal consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Remington Mallett
14 citations
Lucid dreamers can often control dream events, but the limits of that control are unclear. In this study, participants briefly viewed a real-world scene and then, while lucid dreaming, tried to change their dream scenery to match that scene. Even when dreamers were aware during the dream that their reinstatement was inaccurate, the dream imagery remained incorrect. This dissociation between memory access and dream imagery indicates that detailed control over dream content is limited, despite the ability to broadly change the dream environment. The findings suggest that reinstating waking contexts during lucid sleep can be a method for studying sleep, dreams, and memory.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2025
Anusha Garg, Shivang Shelat, Madeleine E. Gross et al.
13 citations
Thinking aloud while letting the mind wander does not substantially alter the stream of consciousness compared to thinking silently. In two studies with 111 and 102 participants, people who verbalized their ongoing thoughts showed no significant differences in meta-awareness or how often their topics shifted. Of 21 thought qualities and 18 content topics examined, only three qualities (private thoughts, mind blanking, and session difficulty) and one topic (partner, intimacy, love, and sexual matters) differed between conditions. Cognitive load also did not differ. The findings indicate that the Think Aloud method is a reliable and minimally reactive tool for studying the natural flow of thoughts in task-absent settings.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2011
Erica Cosentino
13 citations
The narrative self, or extended self, is not a linguistic construction but is created by mental time travel—the ability to mentally project backward to relive past events or forward to anticipate future ones. Narrative language itself arises from a core brain network that includes mental time travel, mindreading, and visuo-spatial systems, rather than being the source of the narrative self. This challenges the common view that language constructs the narrative self.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
K Appel, S Füllhase, S Kern et al.
12 citations
Lucid dreams, where the dreamer is aware they are dreaming, are hard to induce in people without prior experience in a sleep laboratory. By simplifying a previous induction protocol, twenty naïve subjects spent one or two nights in a sleep lab. After about six hours of sleep, they were woken during REM sleep, performed cognitive tasks, and returned to bed. Ten subjects reported a lucid dream in the subsequent sleep period, and eight of these gave a predefined eye signal visible in the electrooculogram during REM sleep. The simplified protocol successfully replicated earlier results.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 27, 2024
Anthony Bloxham, Caroline L. Horton
11 citations
The link between dreaming and sleep-dependent memory consolidation remains unclear, with mixed empirical results partly due to the elusive nature of dreams and methodological inconsistencies. This paper critically examines common assumptions and practices in this research area, offering a theoretical synthesis of existing models and evidence. It recommends using Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR) to investigate whether dream content can be tied to specific cued memory activations. Additional suggestions focus on improving research methods and clarifying why and how researchers search for memory sources in dreams, and what function, if any, those sources might serve.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2024
Nicholas K. Canby, Jared R. Lindahl, Willoughby B. Britton et al.
11 citations
Experiences like mystical states, non-dual awareness, selflessness, and ego dissolution are increasingly studied in meditation and psychedelic research, but their definitions and measures often overlap and lack precision, especially regarding pathological experiences. In a survey of 386 people who reported an experience involving a loss of self or self-boundaries, researchers used statistical and qualitative methods to identify 16 distinct characteristics of such experiences. These included different types of changes in sense of self, accompanying phenomena, and cognitive or emotional responses. The results provide a more specific model for measuring and describing these experiences across contexts like meditation, psychedelics, and psychopathology.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2019
Lachlan Kent, George Van Doorn, Britt Klein
11 citations
A hierarchical framework for consciousness is proposed that parallels factorial models of cognition and intelligence. Using temporal extension as a dimension—similar to how psychology organizes memory into short-term, long-term, and long-lasting—the analysis fits memory and time consciousness along the same logarithmic scale for timescales under 100 seconds. Different forms of time consciousness, such as experience, wakefulness, and self-consciousness, are embedded within ascending timescales of memory modes. A second dimension integrates higher-order consciousness and emotion with memory and cognition, aligning with existing theories of cognitive and emotional intelligence.
Consciousness and Cognition
April 1, 2018
Sara Dell'Erba, David J Brown, Michael J Proulx
11 citations
A case report describes the experience of a congenitally blind individual, BP, after using LSD. BP reported no visual hallucinations, but instead experienced novel sensory alterations in other functioning senses, consistent with synthetic synesthesia and crossmodal correspondences. The absence of visual hallucinations and the low rates of psychosis observed in the congenitally blind population suggest that acquired visual experiences may be necessary for visual-like hallucinations, and that psychedelic-induced synesthesia can manifest through non-visual modalities.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2009
Elizabeth Schier
11 citations
Phenomenal consciousness may be independent of access, and one way to test this is by looking for isomorphisms between phenomenal and neural activation spaces. Using verbal reports to map phenomenal spaces does not undermine this methodology, because mapping activation and phenomenal space through different means does not preclude their identification. The paper concludes by considering how empirical data could address this theoretical question.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2009
Elizabeth Irvine
10 citations
A critique argues that claims by Block and Snodgrass about phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness, based on signal detection theory analysis of qualitative difference paradigms like exclusion failure, are unwarranted. Partial cognitive access, not a total lack, can explain exclusion failure results. Snodgrass's Objective Threshold/Strategic model relies on a problematic 'enable' approach that denies intentional control of unconscious perception and effects of task instructions on phenomenal consciousness. Many of Block's examples also depend on this approach. Qualitative difference paradigms may index only a subset of access consciousness, so they cannot isolate phenomenal consciousness, and attempts to do so face serious methodological problems.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2023
Salvatore G Chiarella, Luca Simione, Monia D'Angiò et al.
9 citations
Selective attention produces both costs and benefits in iconic memory and fragile visual short-term memory, which are linked to phenomenal consciousness. In three experiments using a retro-cue paradigm, attentional costs disrupted visual maintenance at longer delays. Reducing the memory array exposure from 250 ms to 100 ms prevented participants from selecting objects based on their priorities, indicating a bottom-up factor. A pattern mask presented before transfer to visual working memory reduced overall performance but preserved the priority effect. These findings suggest that fragile-VSTM and iconic memory play distinct roles in feature-based attentional selection, with implications for phenomenal consciousness before conscious access.