Conscious processing is associated with coordinated interactions among distributed neural systems, yet the biological constraints that enable and sustain large-scale neural integration remain incompletely understood. Contemporary theories emphasize computational, informational, and network mechanisms, while the potential contribution of systems-level energetic organization has received...
The low-frequency resonome of the human brain, understood as the structured hierarchy of infra-slow, delta, and theta electromagnetic field organization across approximately 0.1–8 Hz, is central to large-scale neural coordination, state transitions, sleep-wake dynamics, predictive regulation, and conscious access. Existing theories explain many aspects of these phenomena through neuronal...
Building on the EMI framework that conceptualises consciousness, cognition, and behaviour as emergent phenomena arising from dynamic interactions among energy, mass, and information, this article extends the model into the educational domain by reframing learning as a resonance-based process within complex adaptive systems. While the initial formulation of EMI provided a scale-free biophysical...
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic known to alter subjective experience and induce lasting psychological changes, including increased cognitive flexibility and reduced rigid self-related beliefs. Contextual factors, including preparatory mental states, are thought to play a key role in shaping these effects. Compassion imagery, which engages care-affiliative motivational systems, may represent...
Cognitive neuroscience has accumulated robust findings (e.g., order effects in judgment, multi-path motor preparation, perceptual binding, attentional selection, and the recursive construction of self and time) that systematically resist explanation within classical probabilistic and causal frameworks. We argue that these are not anomalies but signatures of a deeper, non-commutative...
This paper proposes TEVSER (Theory of Evolving Self-Representations), a framework describing how increasingly complex forms of regulation give rise to psyche, consciousness, and intelligence. The central idea is that a living system is a self-regulating system that maintains homeostasis. Within this perspective, regulation can be described as a hierarchy of self-representations ( Ω ), emerging...
Introduction: Empathy research spans the social, natural, and clinical sciences, yet its translational impact has been limited by conflicting conceptual frameworks and incompatible methodologies. This paper addresses these barriers by introducing a transdisciplinary framework that consolidates predominant theories of empathy and integrates contemporary neuroscience findings. Methods: A...
This study analyzes neural and behavioral events occurring before, during, and after the emergence of a pain quale and the consciousness of that pain to examine the causal efficacy of the quale and consciousness. It finds that events occurring before or concurrently with the emergence of the quale are neither caused nor influenced by the quale or consciousness. Events occurring afterward may...
We report a clinical case illustrating rapid, reversible, and reproducible hemispheric differences in subjective experience and autonomic arousal during lateral visual field viewing. A man in his 40s with longstanding anxiety and depression showed repeatable shifts in affective state, self-appraisal, and appraisal of the clinician when alternately viewing through the right versus left lateral...
The self is increasingly conceptualized as an embodied, predictive process in contemporary cognitive and affective neuroscience. The brain continually infers the causes of both exteroceptive and interoceptive signals in order to minimize prediction error and maintain allostatic balance. Within this framework, emotion can be understood as an inference about changes in bodily states. Parallel...
This article addresses the question of which metaphysical paradigm is most suitable for gaining a deeper understanding of our conscious inner life and bringing us closer to a powerful theory of consciousness (TOC). To answer this question, the key characteristics of a strong theory, namely, predictive and explanatory power, are used to evaluate various paradigms. The predictive power of a TOC...
Editorial: Quantum and quantum-like effects across neuroscience, volume 1. For about thirty years now a growing literature has applied quantum probability theory to successfully describe a wide range of statistical question-answering phenomena in psychology that appear irrational from a classical perspective (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11). In the present volume, (12) presents a systematic motivation...
This study addresses a central question in neuroscience: What is the physical nature of consciousness? Taking a neuroscientific approach, the study first establishes working definitions for its principal terms-qualia, consciousness, and information-to specify clearly the entities under investigation. It then analyzes the essential features of these defined terms. Information, in particular, is...
Frontiers in Human NeuroscienceMarch 2, 2026Juan Camilo Castro Martínez, Felipe Botero-Rodríguez, Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez et al.
Neuropsychiatry is a transdisciplinary field at the intersection of neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and humanities. Despite this strategic position, a comprehensive framework is still needed to bridge these domains. This review examines the historical evolution of how neurological, mental, and neuropsychiatric symptoms have been conceptualized, from antiquity to contemporary models, using...
Why some physical systems are accompanied by subjective experience remains unresolved in neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Building on predictive processing and the Free Energy Principle, I propose that phenomenal consciousness (what-it-is-like-ness) arises when an information-processing system enters a regime of dynamic entropic closure: a metastable condition in which (i) internally...
This paper addresses the problem of integrating phenomenal consciousness with physical laws by seeking to identify and define its function. The central claim is that the hard problem is caused by the same epistemic paradox that makes quantum and classical physics mutually incompatible: the measure-theoretic limit. It is logically impossible to explain the mechanism by which state transitions...
Discussions of free will often center on the question of whether actions are determined, with a special focus on causes, effects, and when subjects experience the desire to act relative to neural events. However, because the only evidence for the existence of free will is the subjective experience itself, explanation must center on the phenomenal: why do we feel free? Here, we propose a...
Caregiver-infant interaction represents the space where development happens through time. According to the mutual regulation model (MRM) by Tronick, meaning-making, emotion regulation, and stress resilience all emerge from the complex fabric of caregiver-infant interaction. Within this model, the dyadic expansion of consciousness (DEC) identifies how adult caregivers and infants co-create an...
Dual-process theory of the brain distinguishes fast, parallel, late-commitment cognition (System 1) from slow, sequential, early-commitment cognition (System 2), yet lacks a mechanistic explanation for how these modes operate or how the brain switches between them. Quantum cognition research demonstrates that human decision-making follows quantum probability models under low confidence and...
A central challenge in consciousness research concerns the relationship between neural activity and conscious experience. While decades of work have identified numerous neural correlates of consciousness, these findings increasingly indicate that activation magnitude, localization, or stimulus processing alone are insufficient to account for awareness. What remains less clearly articulated is...
Ephaptic field research has undergone a remarkable evolution spanning over nine decades, from pioneering observations in the 1930s through a period of severe scientific skepticism in the mid-20th century to a contemporary renaissance driven by advanced computational modeling, measurement techniques, and new consciousness theories. This review traces the complete chronological development of...
Voltage-gated sodium (NaV) channels are essential for neuronal excitability and action-potential generation, yet the electrodynamic consequences of voltage-sensor motion remain largely unexplored. Here, we propose a biophysically grounded hypothesis in which transient electromechanical dynamics of NaV-channel voltage sensors give rise to weak cooperative electrodynamic interactions at the axon...
When it comes to consciousness, a central problem is a lack of clarity regarding the ontological status of the phenomenon to be explained. What kind of 'thing in the world' is consciousness? In other words, what will a naturalization of consciousness look like? Naturalization requires that every agreed property of consciousness is made continuous with the properties admitted by the natural...