Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
May 22, 2014
Laura eSchmalzl, Mardi A Crane-Godreau, Peter ePayne
Cognitive neuroscience has moved from viewing the mind as disembodied and computational toward understanding mental functions through the physical body and environment. In contemplative science, attention to bodily sensations has mostly been studied in seated meditation, but movement-based practices like Yoga, Qigong, and Tai Chi also cultivate interoceptive, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic awareness. These practices likely underlie modern somatic therapies such as the Feldenkrais Method and Alexander Technique. This paper examines how these practices are grounded in embodiment, movement, and contemplation through an enactive approach to cognition, highlighting challenges Western scientists face when studying practices based on a non-dualistic view of mind and body.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Geraint A Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya
Creativity, central to human innovation and culture, remains poorly understood scientifically, partly because it has been viewed as a mysterious puzzle. Recent neuroscience has begun exploring its neural correlates, but the field still relies on popular notions like right-brain thinking and divergent thinking. This article presents a computational framework for creativity grounded in Baars' Global Workspace Theory, enhanced with information-theoretic mechanisms. It proposes a neurocognitive architecture emphasizing unconscious and pre-conscious brain processes—such as unconscious thought theory, mind wandering, and spontaneous brain states. The central argument is that pre-conscious creativity precedes conscious creativity, and the model offers a mechanism for this transition, aiming to guide future neuroscientific research.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Glenn Carruthers
The sense of agency—the feeling of being the cause of one's own actions—is typically explained by identifying the cognitive mechanism that produces it. This paper argues that an unconscious representation of one's own agency can also exist and play a different role in cognition. The author uses the "occasionality problem" to show that distinguishing conscious from unconscious agency representations has theoretical benefits, framing this as an instance of Dennett's "Hard Question": once a representation is elicited, how is it used differently when the subject is aware of it versus when they are not? Two single-function hypotheses—that awareness involves attention or verbal report—are considered and rejected. Multifunction accounts like global workspace theory remain plausible, as does a non-functionalist alternative: the difference may lie in the representation's nature, not its use.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Antonella Maselli, Mel Slater
Full-body ownership illusions and shifts in perceived self-location are both components of bodily self-consciousness that can be manipulated through congruent visuotactile stimulation in virtual reality. Although these two components are usually coupled, they can be selectively altered. Self-location was affected when viewing a virtual body from a third-person perspective, but ownership toward the virtual body was experienced only when there was total or partial spatial overlap between the real and virtual body. When the virtual body appeared in far extra-personal space, changes in self-location occurred without ownership. Partial overlap boosted both ownership and perceived self-location change. The findings suggest that self-location changes rely on visuotactile peripersonal space representations, while ownership depends on visuo-proprioceptive signals.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Jennifer Windt, Dominic L Harkness, Bigna Lenggenhager
In ordinary waking life, people cannot tickle themselves because the brain attenuates sensations produced by one's own actions. However, people woken from REM sleep dreams can tickle themselves, and a new web-based study explored whether this also occurs during lucid dreaming. Participants rated sensations during self-tickling and being tickled while awake, imagining, and lucid dreaming. Preliminary results suggest that during lucid control dreams, the usual difference between self-tickling and being tickled by another disappears; both feel similar to self-tickling while awake. The authors speculate that sensory attenuation for self-produced tickles may extend to tickles from dream characters. The study's main contribution is theoretical, using predictive processing to discuss sensory attenuation, self-other distinction, and agency.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Tim Gard, Jessica J Noggle, Crystal L Park et al.
A theoretical framework and systems-based network model proposes that yoga integrates top-down and bottom-up forms of self-regulation to improve psychological health. The model emphasizes how specific components of yoga practice affect cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and autonomic output under stress through interoception and bottom-up input, resulting in bidirectional feedback between high- and low-level brain networks and afferent input from interoceptive processes. From a predictive coding perspective, yoga shifts perceptual inference for stress modulation and optimal self-regulation. Over time and practice, self-regulatory processes become more automatized and efficient, requiring less effort to initiate and terminating more rapidly when no longer needed. The paper synthesizes evidence from behavior theory and cognitive neuroscience with emerging yoga and meditation research to guide future research on stress-mediated psychological disorders.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Laura Marzetti, Claudia Di Lanzo, Filippo Zappasodi et al.
In expert Theravada Buddhist monks with long-term training, magnetoencephalography revealed that focused attention and open monitoring meditation differently alter the coupling of the posterior cingulate cortex—a key node of the default mode network involved in self-related processing and mind wandering—with other brain regions in the alpha frequency band (8–12 Hz). Focused attention and open monitoring meditation each produced distinct patterns of connectivity between the posterior cingulate cortex and nodes of the default mode network and executive control network.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 27, 2013
P. Milz, P. Faber, D. Lehmann et al.
During breath counting (a meditation-like task), meditation-naïve males showed reduced functional connectivity between cognitive control and sensory perception areas in the brain, as measured by a method that corrects for common artifacts in EEG analysis. When using conventional head-surface coherence, the opposite pattern appeared—higher connectivity during the task. The reductions were similar to, but less widespread than, those previously reported in experienced meditators during meditation. The findings suggest that focusing attention on a bodily sensation without cognitive reasoning lowers connectivity between brain regions involved in executive control and sensory processing.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 29, 2013
Paul F Smith, Cynthia L Darlington
The vestibular system, which detects head motion and gravitational orientation, not only controls eye movements and posture but also influences cognition, emotion, and the sense of self. Vestibular dysfunction can cause depersonalization and derealization—feelings of being "spaced out" or not in control of one's body—suggesting that vestibular signals contribute to self-awareness. This review proposes that the vestibular system supports the concept of self by providing information about self-motion and self-location to brain regions like the temporo-parietal junction.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
August 23, 2013
T. Fischmann, M. Russ, M. Leuzinger‐Bohleber
Psychoanalysis and neuroscience can be bridged to study trauma and depression. In an experimental study, neurophysiological changes (fMRI) associated with psychoanalytic treatment were investigated in chronically depressed patients. Changes in the manifest content of dreams were quantified using two independent methods: assessment by the treating psychoanalyst and analysis by an independent evaluator using a standardized method (Moser method). Preliminary results from single cases suggest that psychoanalysis-induced transformation can be assessed objectively.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
June 14, 2013
Camila Valenzuela-Moguillansky, J. K. O 'Regan, C. Petitmengin et al.
The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is not an all-or-nothing experience but involves nuanced perceptual changes that affect both the rubber hand and the participant's real hand. These changes vary greatly between individuals and evolve over time. The study investigated the phenomenology of the RHI, assessing whether typical control conditions impact the sense of body ownership and whether different stages emerge in the illusion's development.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Ausiàs Pomés, Mel Slater
Seeing a virtual body from behind and feeling touch on one's own back can create an illusion of ownership over that distant body, but the experience is more complex than simple self-recognition. In an experiment with 30 participants, those who received synchronous tactile stimulation on their back while viewing the same stimulation on a virtual body 1.2 meters in front reported stronger referral of touch to the virtual body than those with asynchronous stimulation. However, no differences emerged between groups in body ownership, threat responses to a descending fan, or drift sensations.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Jason J Braithwaite, Kelly James, Hayley Dewe et al.
People who have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are more efficient at taking an external, third-person perspective on a novel perspective-taking task compared to people who have not had OBEs. They also report significantly higher levels of derealization—feeling alienated from their surroundings—but not higher levels of other anomalous body experiences, emotional numbing, or sensory recall anomalies. These results support a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences (like feeling unreal) and disembodied ones (like OBEs), with only the latter linked to enhanced exocentric perspective-taking. The findings suggest that OBEs may reflect a facilitated ability to adopt an external viewpoint, rather than a deficit.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Saskia De Leede-Smith, Emma Barkus
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) occur across the lifespan in both clinical and non-clinical populations, and recent research indicates they are not necessarily a sign of psychosis. In children, need for care depends on negative beliefs and appraisals about the voices, a pattern that persists into adulthood. Non-clinical voice hearers typically experience negative impact only if they have negative experiences related to the voice, such as negative content, frequency, emotional valence, anxiety, or depression. Maladaptive coping strategies in patient populations distinguish clinical from non-clinical groups and are linked to need for care. Whether the underlying mechanisms start the same and diverge remains unknown.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2012
Ying Liu, Anne-Lise Paradis, Lydia Yahia-Cherif et al.
Neural activity over posterior brain regions between 200 and 300 milliseconds after a stimulus distinguishes seen from unseen stimuli. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in 14 participants who viewed faint colored gratings at the threshold of visibility, the main sources of awareness-related activity were localized bilaterally in the lateral occipital complex and right posterior infero-temporal region, not in frontal or parietal areas. Color congruency with a preceding cue did not improve detection of the grating, and awareness-related activity was independent of color congruency. However, color congruency was processed differently when a grating was present versus absent, engaging left parietal regions. The findings suggest an occipital source of visual awareness insensitive to color congruency and a separate parietal process sensitive to co-localized features but not directly involved in awareness.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 16, 2011
Valentin Wyart, Stanislas Dehaene, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Spatial attention amplifies early visual brain responses around 100 milliseconds after a stimulus appears, but this amplification does not determine whether the stimulus is consciously detected. In a magnetoencephalography experiment, participants attended toward or away from masked stimuli that were physically identical yet detected half the time. Attention increased occipital responses equally for detected and missed stimuli and did not increase detection rates. The earliest neural correlate of conscious detection occurred around 120 milliseconds over contralateral temporal cortex, independent of attention. A later correlate of conscious reportability appeared from 220 milliseconds over temporal and frontal cortex, coinciding with attentional reorienting triggered by masks at uncued locations. Conscious detection of a masked stimulus at an unexpected location captures spatial attention, supporting a double dissociation between endogenous spatial attention and perceptual awareness.