In this article, we show that lay people's beliefs about how minds relate to bodies are more complex than past research suggests, and that treating them as a multidimensional construct helps explain inconclusive findings from the literature regarding their relation to beliefs about whether humans possess a free will. In two studies, we found that items previously used to assess a unidimensional...
An experimental home study examined the impact of a pre-sleep protocol for enhancing self-awareness, lucidity, and responsiveness in dreams. It included ingesting the cholinesterase inhibitor galantamine--which is widely reported to increase the frequency of lucid dreaming--prior to engaging in middle-of-the-night meditation and the imaginary reliving of a distressing dream while exercising new...
While many studies have linked prediction errors and event related potentials at a single processing level, few consider how these responses interact across levels. In response, we present a factorial analysis of a multi-level oddball task - the local-global task - and we explore it when participants are sedated versus recovered. We found that the local and global levels in fact interact. This...
Rounis, Maniscalco, Rothwell, Passingham, and Lau (2010) reported that stimulation of prefrontal cortex impairs visual metacognition. Bor, Schwartzman, Barrett, and Seth (2017) attempted to replicate this result, but adopted an experimental design that reduced their chanceof obtaining positive findings. Despite that, their results appeared initially consistent with those of Rounis et al., but...
Despite increasing interest in effects of meditation, systematic in-depth research on how it qualitatively feels to engage in different kinds of contemplative practices is still missing. To fill this gap, we explore the validity of Micro-phenomenological Interviews (MpI) to assess experiences during breathing meditation (BM), observing-thought meditation (OTM), and loving-kindness meditation...
Gene expression studies have recently identified the amphioxus homolog of a domain comprising the combined caudal diencephalon plus midbrain, regions implicated in locomotory control and some forms of primary consciousness in vertebrates. The results of EM-level reconstructions of the larval brain of amphioxus, reviewed here, highlight the importance of inputs to this region for light and...
Are dreams bizarre, nonsensical experiences or real-world simulations? I introduce a pluralist approach to dream content that highlights the philosophical and empirical implications of treating dreaming as a highly varied experience that can be anywhere on a spectrum from truly bizarre and incoherent to wake-like and mundane. Here I discuss several explanations for why theorists disagree on...
This review provides a commentary on coloured-hearing arising on hearing music: music-colour synaesthesia. Although traditionally explained by the hyperconnectivity theory (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a) and the disinhibited feedback theory (Grossenbacher & Lovelace, 2001) as a purely perceptual phenomenon, the review of eight coloured-hearing neuroimaging studies shows that it may not be...
The origin(s) and purpose(s) of consciousness continue to be fervently debated by neuroscientists. A recent unconventional hypothesis put forth by Morsella et al. suggests the primary function of consciousness is the integration, selection, and execution of advantageous lower-level voluntary skeletal muscle behavior on surrounding external environments. However, at main issue is whether more...
This case report offers rare insights into crossmodal responses to psychedelic drug use in a congenitally blind (CB) individual as a form of synthetic synesthesia. BP's personal experience provides us with a unique report on the psychological and sensory alterations induced by hallucinogenic drugs, including an account of the absence of visual hallucinations, and a compelling look at the...
Mindfulness courses conventionally use effortful, focused meditation to train attention. In contrast, natural settings can effortlessly support state mindfulness and restore depleted attention resources, which could facilitate meditation. We performed two studies that compared conventional training with restoration skills training (ReST) that taught low-effort open monitoring meditation in a...
This study investigates the time course of incorporation of waking life experiences into daydreams. Thirty-one participants kept a diary for 10 days, reporting major daily activities (MDAs), personally significant events (PSEs) and major concerns (MCs). They were then cued for daydream, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and N2 dream reports in the sleep laboratory. There was a higher incorporation into...
Specific mental training cultivates diminished self-reference, encompassing non-duality, emptiness, awakened-awareness, and compassionate experiences. We aimed to elucidate the neural substrates of four distinct, interdependent Essence-of-Mind states: (1) timelessness, (2) non-preference, non-duality, non-conceptualization, (3) the view of luminosity and limitlessness, (4) unified compassionate...
There is almost unanimous consensus among the theorists of consciousness that the phenomenal character of a mental state cannot exist without consciousness. We argue for a reappraisal of this consensus. We distinguish two models of phenomenal consciousness: unitary and dual. Unitary model takes the production of a phenomenal quality and it's becoming conscious to be one and the same thing. The...
Computer-based dreams content analysis relies on word frequencies within predefined categories in order to identify different elements in text. As a complementary approach, we explored the capabilities and limitations of word-embedding techniques to identify word usage patterns among dream reports. These tools allow us to quantify words associations in text and to identify the meaning of target...
This paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology. It elaborates, defends, and improves on our earlier proposal for resolving that debate, according to which the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. After showing how proposals like ours have been misunderstood or misused by others, we deploy our operationalization to argue that the correct way to...
Conscious awareness refers to information processing in the brain that is accompanied by subjective, reportable experiences. Current models of conscious access propose that sufficiently strong sensory stimuli ignite a global network of regions allowing further processing. The immense number of possible experiences indicates that activity associated with conscious awareness must be highly...
Cognitive control processes influence how motor sequence information is utilised and represented. Since cognitive control processes are shared amongst goal-oriented tasks, motor sequence learning and performance might be influenced by preceding cognitive tasks such as focused-attention meditation (FAM). Prior to a serial reaction time task (SRTT), participants completed either a single-session...
Integration is commonly viewed as a key process for generating conscious experiences. Accordingly, there should be increased activity within the neural correlates of consciousness when demands on integration increase. We used fMRI and "informational masking" to isolate the neural correlates of consciousness and measured how the associated brain activity changed as a function of required...
Working memory has long been thought to be closely related to consciousness. However, recent empirical studies show that unconscious content may be maintained within working memory and that complex cognitive computations may be performed on-line. This promotes research on the exact relationships between consciousness and working memory. Current evidence for working memory being a conscious as...
Sensations and thoughts have been described as potentially related to self-awareness. We therefore asked whether sensations that arise in the absence of external triggers, i.e., spontaneous sensations (SPS), which were shown to relate to interoception and perception of the self, vary as a function of the individual propensity to generate spontaneous thoughts, i.e., mind-wandering. The Mind...
According to the levels-of-processing hypothesis, transitions from unconscious to conscious perception may depend on stimulus processing level, with more gradual changes for low-level stimuli and more dichotomous changes for high-level stimuli. In an event-related fMRI study we explored this hypothesis using a visual backward masking procedure. Task requirements manipulated level of processing....
Consciousness research has much focused on faster frequencies like alpha or gamma while neglecting the slower ones in the infraslow (0.001-0.1Hz) and slow (0.1-1Hz) frequency range. These slower frequency ranges have a "bad reputation" though; their increase in power can observed during the loss of consciousness as in sleep, anesthesia, and vegetative state. However, at the same time, slower...
We examined whether semantic processing occurs without awareness using continuous flash suppression (CFS). In two priming tasks, participants were required to judge whether a target was a word or a non-word, and to report whether the masked prime was visible. Experiment 1 manipulated the lexical congruency between the prime-target pairs and Experiment 2 manipulated their semantic relatedness....
Electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials have remained a valuable source of data and theories concerning neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). The EEG based methods are far from being exhausted and are continually valuable in the quest for the markers of NCC. To set the background for the research presented in this issue, we review the published work on EEG-based markers of NCC. The article...