Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by distorted self-views. The goal of this study was to examine whether mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) alters behavioral and brain measures of negative and positive self-views. Fifty-six adult patients with generalized SAD were randomly assigned to MBSR or a comparison aerobic exercise (AE) program. A self-referential encoding task was...
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPATIAL ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUS ACCESS HAS OFTEN BEEN PICTURED AS A SINGLE CAUSAL LINK: spatial attention would provide conscious access to weak stimuli by increasing their effective contrast during early visual processing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed whether the early attentional amplification of visual responses, around 100 ms following stimulus onset, had a...
In 2008, Lesley University Professors Geoffrey Koetsch and Ellen Schön conducted an informal survey of New England artists to ascertain the degree to which recent work in neuroscience had impacted the visual arts. The two curators mounted an exhibition (MINDmatters May-June, 2008) at the Laconia Gallery in Boston in which they showcased the work of artists who had chosen mental processes as...
Although the adult brain was once seen as a rather static organ, it is now clear that the organization of brain circuitry is constantly changing as a function of experience or learning. Yet, research also shows that learning is often specific to the trained stimuli and task, and does not improve performance on novel tasks, even very similar ones. This perspective examines the idea that...
Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that are internal and self-related. The cerebral cortex appears to be divided into two corresponding systems: an "extrinsic" system composed of brain areas that respond more to external stimuli and tasks and an "intrinsic" system composed of brain areas that...
Event Abstract Back to Event Probing cortical oscillations with transcranial stimulation Bradley R. Postle1* 1 University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in cortical oscillations as a fundamental property of brain function. Oscillatory dynamics have been implicated in, for example, perception, binding information across anatomically...
Visual awareness is a specific form of consciousness. Binocular rivalry, the alternation of visual consciousness resulting when the two eyes view differing stimuli, allows one to experimentally investigate visual awareness. Observers usually indicate the gradual changes of conscious perception in binocular rivalry by a binary measure: pressing a button. However, in our experiments we used...
Binocular rivalry (BR) occurs when the brain cannot fuse percepts from the two eyes because they are different. We review results relating to an ongoing controversy regarding the cortical site of the BR mechanism. Some BR qualities suggest it is low-level: (1) BR, as its name implies, is usually between eyes and only low-levels have access to utrocular information. (2) All input to one eye is...
The default mode network (DMN) refers to regional brain activity that is greater during rest periods than during attention-demanding tasks; many studies have reported DMN alterations in patient populations. It has also been shown that the DMN is suppressed by scanner background noise (SBN), which is the noise produced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, it is unclear...
Live theater is typically designed to alter the state of mind of the audience. Indeed, the perceptual inputs issuing from a live theatrical performance are intended to represent something else, and the actions, emphasized by the writing and staging, are the key prompting the adhesion of viewers to fiction, i.e., their belief that it is real. This phenomenon raises the issue of the cognitive...
In this review, we summarize the subjective experiential phenomena and behavioral changes that are caused by electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex or subcortical nuclei in awake and conscious human subjects. Our comprehensive review contains a detailed summary of the data obtained from electrical brain stimulation (EBS) in humans in the last 100 years. Findings from the EBS studies may...
The question of whether our behavior is guided by our conscious intentions is gaining momentum within the field of cognitive neuroscience. It has been demonstrated that the subjective experience that conscious intentions are the driving force of our actions, is built partially on a post hoc reconstruction. Our hypothesis was that this reconstructive process is mediated by an action-monitoring...
People with schizophrenia frequently report cannabis use, and cannabis may be a risk factor for schizophrenia, mediated through effects on brain function and biochemistry. Thus, it is conceivable that cannabis may also influence cognitive functioning in this patient group. We report data from our own laboratory on the use of cannabis by schizophrenia patients, and review the existing literature...
Event Abstract Back to Event MMN to sound duration deviance during sleep P. Ruby1, A. Caclin1, S. Boulet1, C. Delpuech1 and Dominique Morlet1* 1 INSERM U821, Brain Dynamics and Cognition, Université Lyon 1, France How does the sleeping brain process external stimuli? Are low levels of sensory information processing functional during sleep? For example, is sensory memory maintained when we...
Neurological evidence suggests that disturbed vestibular processing may play a key role in triggering out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Little is known about the brain mechanisms during such pathological conditions, despite recent experimental evidence that the scientific study of such experiences may facilitate the development of neurobiological models of a crucial aspect of self-consciousness:...