Communications Psychology
October 11, 2026
Peter Coppola, Pilleriin Sikka, Katja Valli et al.
Abstract The language people use to describe their inner experiences arising during sleep and wakefulness provides a window into the mind. Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health. Here we use graph theory to analyse a large dataset of dream (n = 1434) and mind wandering (n = 1619) reports from...
Communications Psychology
June 9, 2026
Daphne Rimsky Robert, Matteo Lisi, Kévin Nguy et al.
What is the role of sensory processing in conscious perception? Current theories of consciousness are divided on this question. Some propose that conscious perception arises during the buildup of sensory representations. Others argue for a secondary process that broadcasts these representations to higher-level areas. This second view makes a counter-intuitive prediction: one could consciously...
Communications Psychology
June 6, 2026
Theresa Waclawek, Georges Monette, Astrid Schuetz
Investigations into mindfulness and well-being have increasingly turned toward social outcomes such as compassion. However, research is needed to understand how mindfulness relates to compassion in real-world contexts. Moreover, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain insufficiently understood, with self-related processes-particularly self-absorption and interdependent...
Communications Psychology
June 4, 2026
June-Kyo Kim, Joshua Koh, Charan Ranganath et al.
People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are correlated across individuals during shared experiences, suggesting a role in representing high-level event features. However, it remains unclear whether these shared neural patterns reflect...
Communications Psychology
May 8, 2026
Ronald Fischer, Giovanna Bortolini, Tiago Bortolini et al.
Nonordinary experiences (NOEs) that are subjectively marked as unusual or special have important implications for our understanding of consciousness but are challenging to quantify. Estimates of their prevalence vary widely across disciplines and research traditions, and the reasons for this variation remain unclear. We address this discrepancy in a series of six studies. In study 1, we...
Communications Psychology
April 28, 2026
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
Dreams are universal yet highly idiosyncratic experiences. While memories and personal concerns are known to influence dream content, how such influences evolve over time and how stable individual traits shape dreaming remain unclear. Here, we systematically quantified the semantic structure of dreams in a large, multimodal dataset comprising 3366 reports of dreams and waking experiences...
Communications Psychology
November 26, 2025
Biyu J. He
Consciousness Science is entering an age of unprecedented opportunity, thanks to recent empirical and theoretical advances, increasing interest in the topic, and technological advances in neuroscience. The role theories will play in a maturing science of consciousness deserves a closer look.
Communications Psychology
November 26, 2025
Morten Overgaard, Peter Fazekas, Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup et al.
Consciousness research has long been dominated by competing grand theories, yet consensus remains elusive. We propose shifting focus toward construct-based, data-driven, and iterative approaches that identify the empirical building blocks of conscious experience and provide a more cumulative, integrative path forward for the field.
Communications Psychology
September 29, 2025
John P Veillette, Yimeng Cheng, Aditi Joshi et al.
The nature of self-awareness has been a topic of inquiry for thousands of years, with profound implications for law and ethics, as well as for understanding a host of neurological and psychiatric pathologies. An influential view in philosophy of mind is that the "self" is a construct of consciousness, its basic functions - such as the sense of agency, the capacity by which we attribute sensory...
Communications Psychology
May 21, 2025
Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Simon van Gaal, Stephen M Fleming et al.
3 citations
In noisy perceptual environments, people frequently make decisions based on non-perceptual information to maximize rewards. Therefore, a central problem in psychophysics, metacognition and consciousness research is to distinguish between decisions resulting from changes in subjective experience and those arising from non-perceptual information. It has recently been proposed that confidence...
Communications Psychology
April 13, 2025
Martha N. Havenith, Max Leidenberger, Jelena Brasanac et al.
14 citations
Abstract Altered states of consciousness (ASCs), induced e.g. during psychedelic-assisted therapy, show potential to treat prevalent mental health disorders like depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. However, access to such treatments is restricted by legal, medical, and financial barriers. Circular breathwork may present a non-pharmacological and hence more accessible alternative to...
Communications Psychology
February 18, 2025
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
Evidence suggests that (almost) everyone dreams during their sleep and may actually do so for a large part of the night. Yet, dream recall shows large interindividual variability. Understanding the factors that influence dream recall is crucial for advancing our knowledge regarding dreams' origin, significance, and functions. Here, we tackled this issue by prospectively collecting dream reports...
Communications Psychology
August 1, 2024
Hugh McGovern, Hilary J Grimmer, Manoj K. Doss et al.
48 citations
Psychedelics are recognised for their potential to re-orient beliefs. We propose a model of how psychedelics can, in some cases, lead to false insights and thus false beliefs. We first review experimental work on laboratory-based false insights and false memories. We then connect this to insights and belief formation under psychedelics using the active inference framework. We propose that...
Communications Psychology
July 18, 2024
Oliver Durcan, Peter Holland, Joydeep Bhattacharya
Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the "flow state" was initially discovered in experts deeply engaged in self-rewarding activities. However, recent neurophysiology research often measures flow in constrained and unfamiliar activities. In this perspective article, we address the challenging yet necessary considerations for studying flow state's neurophysiology. We aggregate an activity-autonomy...
Communications Psychology
September 21, 2023
Antonia Eisenkoeck
A recent study in Cognition provides evidence for phenomenal consciousness without knowledge thereof, by virtue of a sound detection and discrimination paradigm.
Communications Psychology
September 5, 2023
Antonia Eisenkoeck
1 citation
A new study in Nature shows psychedelics’ ability to reopen a critical period of development in mice. This shared property across psychedelic drugs was proportional to the duration of acute subjective effects of the drugs in humans.