Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2018
Francesca Pistoia, Giulia Mattiacci, Marco Sarà et al.
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been defined as any conscious perceptual experience occurring in individuals pronounced clinically dead or who came very close to physical death. They are frequently reported by patients surviving a critical injury and, intriguingly, they show common features across different populations. The tool traditionally used to assess NDEs is the NDE Scale, which is...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 15, 2017
Tom B. Mole, Julieta Galante, Iona C. Walker et al.
6 citations
For millennia, humans have focused their attention on the breath to develop mindfulness, but finding a scientific way to harness mindful breathing has proven elusive. Existing attempts to objectively measure and feedback on mindfulness have relied on specialist external hardware including electroencephalograms or respirometers that have been impractical for the majority of people learning to...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 6, 2017
Joseph Glicksohn, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Federica Mauro et al.
38 citations
The notion that exposure to a monotonous sensory environment could elicit reports indicating aberrant subjective experience and altered time perception is the impetus for the present report. Research has looked at the influence of exposure to such environments on time perception, reporting that the greater the environmental variation, the shorter is the time estimation obtained by the method of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 26, 2017
B. R. Cahn, Matthew S. Goodman, C. Peterson et al.
Thirty-eight individuals (mean age: 34.8 years old) participating in a 3-month yoga and meditation retreat were assessed before and after the intervention for psychometric measures, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), circadian salivary cortisol levels, and pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. Participation in the retreat was found to be associated with decreases in self-reported anxiety...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 16, 2017
A. Ioannides, Lichan Liu, V. Poghosyan et al.
We used tomographic analysis of MEG signals to characterize regional spectral changes in the brain at sleep onset and during light sleep. We identified two key processes that may causally link to loss of consciousness during the quiet or “core” periods of NREM1. First, active inhibition in the frontal lobe leads to delta and theta spectral power increases. Second, activation suppression leads...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 13, 2017
Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Georgios Antonopoulos et al.
85 citations
Background: After an occurrence of a Near-Death Experience (NDE), Near-Death Experiencers (NDErs) usually report extremely rich and detailed narratives. Phenomenologically, a NDE can be described as a set of distinguishable features. Some authors have proposed regular patterns of NDEs, however the actual temporality sequence of NDE core features remains a little explored area. Objectives: The...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
May 23, 2017
Raphaël Millière
216 citations
There is converging evidence that high doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce significant alterations of self-experience, described as the dissolution of the sense of self and the loss of boundaries between self and world. This article discusses the relevance of this phenomenon, known as "drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED)", for cognitive neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind....
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
March 17, 2017
Michael Schaefer, Georg Northoff
43 citations
Who am I? What is the self and where does it come from? This may be one of the oldest problems in philosophy. Beyond traditional philosophy, only very recently approaches from neuroscience (in particular imaging studies) have tried to address these questions, too. So what are neural substrates of our self? An increasing body of evidence has demonstrated that a set of structures labeled as...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
March 16, 2017
Giuseppe Riva, S. Serino, Daniele Di Lernia et al.
Progress in medical science and technology drastically improved physicians’ ability to interact with patient’s physical body. Nevertheless, medicine still addresses the human body from a Hippocratic point of view, considering the organism and its processes just as a matter of mechanics and fluids. However, the interaction between the cognitive neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness (BSC),...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
February 27, 2017
Baland Jalal, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
38 citations
OPINION article Front. Hum. Neurosci., 28 February 2017Sec. Brain Health and Clinical Neuroscience Volume 11 - 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00092
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2017
Noriaki Kanayama, Tomohisa Asai, Takashi Nakao et al.
10 citations
The self includes complicated and heterogeneous functions. Researchers have divided the self into three distinct functions called "agency," "ownership," and "narrative self". These correspond to psychiatric symptoms, behavioral characteristics and neural responses, but their relationship with brain structure is unclear. This study examined the relationship between the subjectivity of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2017
Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Georgios Antonopoulos et al.
correction
[This corrects the article on p. 311 in vol. 11, PMID: 28659779.].
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2017
Raphael Vallat, Tarek Lajnef, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub et al.
High dream recallers (HR) show a larger brain reactivity to auditory stimuli during wakefulness and sleep as compared to low dream recallers (LR) and also more intra-sleep wakefulness (ISW), but no other modification of the sleep macrostructure. To further understand the possible causal link between brain responses, ISW and dream recall, we investigated the sleep microstructure of HR and LR,...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2017
Yusuf O Cakmak, Gazanfer Ekinci, Armin Heinecke et al.
Although minutes of a spinning episode may induce vertigo in the healthy human, as a result of a possible perceptional plasticity, Sufi Whirling Dervishes (SWDs) can spin continuously for an hour without a vertigo perception.This unique long term vestibular system stimulation presents a potential human model to clarify the cortical networks underlying the resistance against vertigo. This study,...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 22, 2016
Philipp Sterzer, Aaron Mishara, Martin Voss et al.
78 citations
Current theories in the framework of hierarchical predictive coding propose that positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions and hallucinations, arise from an alteration in Bayesian inference, the term inference referring to a process by which learned predictions are used to infer probable causes of sensory data. However, for one particularly striking and frequent symptom of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 22, 2016
I-Wen Su, Fang-Wei Wu, Keng-Chen Liang et al.
The multi-dimensional nature of pain renders difficult a holistic understanding of it. The conceptual framework of pain is said to be cognitive-evaluative, in addition to being sensory-discriminative and affective-motivational. To compare participants’ brain-behavior response before and after a six-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) training course on mindfulness in relation to pain...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 22, 2016
Yanli Lin, Megan Fisher, Sean Roberts et al.
The present study sought to uncover the emotion regulatory properties of mindfulness by examining its effects—differentiated as a meditative practice, state of mind, and dispositional trait—on the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential indexing emotional processing. Results revealed that mindfulness as a meditative practice produced a reduction in the difference between the...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
August 30, 2016
David Papo
19 citations
The “entropic brain hypothesis” holds that the quality of conscious states depends on the system’s \nentropy (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). Brain activity is said to become “more random and so harder \nto predict in primary states – of which the psychedelic state is an exemplar.” Psychedelic-induced \nbrain activity would be associated with elevated entropy in some of its aspects with respect...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 4, 2016
Michael David Mrazek, Benjamin W. Mooneyham, Kaita Lepore Mrazek et al.
Scientific understanding of how much the adult brain can be shaped by experience requires examination of how multiple influences combine to elicit cognitive, affective, and neural plasticity. Using an intensive multifaceted intervention, we discovered that substantial and enduring improvements can occur in parallel across multiple cognitive and neuroimaging measures in healthy young adults. The...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 14, 2016
Matthew M. Nour, Lisa Evans, David Nutt et al.
476 citations
Our results demonstrate the psychometric structure, internal consistency and construct validity of the EDI. Moreover, we demonstrate the close relationship between ego-dissolution and the psychedelic experience. The EDI will facilitate the study of the neuronal correlates of ego-dissolution, which is relevant for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and our understanding of psychosis.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 2, 2016
Fabiana M. Carvalho, Khallil Taverna Chaim, Tiago Arruda Sanchez et al.
26 citations
The updating of prospective internal models is necessary to accurately predict future observations. Uncertainty-driven internal model updating has been studied using a variety of perceptual paradigms, and have revealed engagement of frontal and parietal areas. In a distinct literature, studies on temporal expectations have also characterized a time-perception network, which relies on temporal...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
April 26, 2016
Laura Schmalzl, C. Kerr
18 citations
Compared to the extensive body of neuroscientific work on seated meditation practices, far fewer studies have investigated the neural mechanisms underlying movement-based contemplative practices such as yoga or tai chi. One likely reason is the inherent challenge of dealing with their multifaceted nature, typically involving specific movement sequences, regulation of the breath, and modulation...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2016
Tobias Esch, Jeremy Winkler, Volker Auwärter et al.
Background: Research has demonstrated that short meditation training may yield higher pain tolerance in acute experimental pain. Our study aimed at examining underlying mechanisms of this alleged effect. In addition, placebo research has shown that higher pain tolerance is mediated via endogenous neuromodulators: experimental inhibition of opioid receptors by naloxone antagonized this effect....
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2016
Rajanikant Panda, Rose D Bharath, Neeraj Upadhyay et al.
Current research suggests that human consciousness is associated with complex, synchronous interactions between multiple cortical networks. In particular, the default mode network (DMN) of the resting brain is thought to be altered by changes in consciousness, including the meditative state. However, it remains unclear how meditation alters the fast and ever-changing dynamics of brain activity...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2016
Claudio Babiloni, Nicola Marzano, Andrea Soricelli et al.
This article reviews three experiments on event-related potentials (ERPs) testing the hypothesis that primary visual consciousness (stimulus self-report) is related to enhanced cortical neural synchronization as a function of stimulus features. ERP peak latency and sources were compared between "seen" trials and "not seen" trials, respectively related and unrelated to the primary visual...