This paper examines the claim that the phenomenal "for-me-ness" is the core feature of every conscious experience. Any conscious episode is intrinsically given as mine, and this mineness, while non-reflective and non-cognitive, belongs to the personal and phenomenal level. The compatibility checks for the for-me-ness thesis comes from cases such as depersonalization, schizophrenia, infancy and...
This article investigates the emergence of cognitive systems as properties arising from chemical processes, elucidating how cognitive capabilities evolve through the dynamic progression of these systems. Employing the Dynamic Kinetic Stability (DKS) framework, the study traces the evolutionary trajectory from simple chemical reactions to complex cognitive behaviors, emphasizing the emergence of...
The current study investigates performance differences between sensorimotor and emotional experiences when conceptualizing abstract concepts, focusing on two distinct embodied views between the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Emotional Grounding Theory. Methodologically, this study employs the Visual Corpus Analysis approach to conduct an image-based empirical exploration of a dataset...
Biological consciousness is the product of millions of years of evolution, being deeply rooted in the neural architecture of living organisms. It emerges from the interplay of sensory processing, memory, emotion, and metacognition, with the human brain being its most complex known expression. Synthetic consciousness, on the other hand, remains a theoretical construct, an aspiration rather than...
The classical mind-body problem persists as one of the deepest scientific mysteries. Despite the grand claims of the new AI, some of the most basic facts of human vision cannot be explained by current or proposed theories of brain structure and function. This paper reviews some well-known mysteries including the neural binding problem, blind sight, subjective experience and prosthetics. There...
The nature of music improvisation continues to provide an interesting showcase of the multifaceted and skilful ways we engage with and act within our environments. Improvising musicians are somehow able to generate musical material in real time that adaptively navigates musical situations. In this article I explore the broader aspects of improvised activity-such as our bodily interactions with...
We experience our self as a body located in space. However, how information about self-location is integrated into multisensory processes underlying the representation of the peripersonal space (PPS), is still unclear. Prior studies showed that the presence of visual information related to oneself modulates the multisensory processes underlying PPS. Here, we used the crossmodal congruency...
Recent research has proposed that certain aspects of psychosis, as experienced in, e.g., schizophrenia (SCZ), but also aspects of other cognitive conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and synesthesia, can be related to a shattered sense of the notion of self. In this paper, our goal is to show that altered processing of self can be attributed to an abnormal functioning of...
Cognitive ProcessingSeptember 21, 2022Barbara Horrillo Álvarez, Carolina Marín‐Martín, Manuel Rodríguez Abuín et al.
To study whether an 8-week mindfulness meditation training program truly reduces perceived stress without designing a stress reduction program. An experimental study was performed in which we studied the effects of 8 weeks of MM training on attention and awareness, as measured by the MAAS (mindfulness attention awareness scale) and perceived stress, as measured by the PSQ (perceived stress...
Counting objects, especially moving ones, is an important capacity that has been intensively explored in experimental psychology and related disciplines. The common approach is to trace the three counting principles (estimating, subitizing, serial counting) back to functional constructs like the Approximate Number System and the Object Tracking System. While usually attempts are made to explain...
Due to the presence of nonlinearity and volume conduction in electroencephalography (EEG), sometimes it's challenging to find out the actual brain network from neurodynamical alteration. In this paper, two well-known time-frequency brain connectivity measures, namely partial directed coherence (PDC) and directed transfer function (DTF), have been applied to evaluate the performance analysis of...
In this article, I argue that consciousness is a unique way of processing information, in that: it produces information, rather than purely transmitting it; the information it produces is meaningful for us; the meaning it has is always individuated. This uniqueness allows us to process information on the basis of our personal needs and ever-changing interactions with the environment, and...
The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between meditation and cognitive functions. More in depth the purpose is to demonstrate that long-term meditation practice improves attention skills and cognitive flexibility. Eighteen long-term meditation practitioners were compared to a matched control group, who never practiced meditation. Each subject was tested, using computerized...
Two phases of Transcendental Meditation (TM)-transcending and undirected mentation-were compared to each other and to task-free resting using multichannel EEG recorded from 20 TM practitioners. An EEG microstate analysis identified four classes of microstates which were labeled A, B, C and D, based on their similarity to previously published classes. For each class of microstates, mean...
This article argues for a task-based approach to identifying and individuating cognitive systems. The agent-based extended cognition approach faces a problem of cognitive bloat and has difficulty accommodating both sub-individual cognitive systems ("scaling down") and some supra-individual cognitive systems ("scaling up"). The standard distributed cognition approach can accommodate a wider...
Using theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concept and experimental evidence on the brain default mode network (DMN) that constitutes the neural signature of self-referential processes, we hypothesized that the anterior and posterior subnets comprising the DMN should show differences in their integrity as a function of meditation training. Functional connectivity within DMN and its...
The concept of contextual emergence has been proposed as a non-reductive, yet well-defined relation between different levels of description of physical and other systems. It yields a formally sound and empirically applicable procedure to translate between descriptive levels in an overall consistent fashion. This will be discussed for the contextual emergence of mental states from a neural level...
Meditation is a self-induced and willfully initiated practice that alters the state of consciousness. The meditation practice of Zazen, like many other meditation practices, aims at disregarding intrusive thoughts while controlling body posture. It is an open monitoring meditation characterized by detached moment-to-moment awareness and reduced conceptual thinking and self-reference. Which...
Is conceptual space continuous? The answer to this question depends on how concepts are represented in the brain. Vector space representations, which ground conceptual states in the instantaneous firing rates of neurons, have successfully captured cognitive dynamics in a broad range of domains. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that conceptual information is encoded in...
Cognitive ProcessingNovember 1, 2013Jui-Feng Tsai, Shaw-Hwa Jou, WenChun Cho et al.
Increased alpha and theta activities in electroencephalography (EEG) have been found during various forms of meditation. However, advanced stage of meditation drew less attention to date. We aimed at exploring EEG characteristics during advanced meditation. Bilateral absolute alpha and theta EEG powers were recorded when a single meditator at rest, exercising breath meditation, and reaching the...
Experienced Qigong meditators who regularly perform the exercises "Thinking of Nothing" and "Qigong" were studied with multichannel EEG source imaging during their meditations. The intracerebral localization of brain electric activity during the two meditation conditions was compared using sLORETA functional EEG tomography. Differences between conditions were assessed using t statistics...
Previous researchers have studied meditation practices as a means to understand consciousness as well as altered states of consciousness. Various meditation techniques, such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Qigong, have been explored with source localization tools; however, the concentrative meditation technique has yet to be fully studied in this manner. The current study demonstrates...
Activation of a default mode network (DMN) including frontal and parietal midline structures varies with cognitive load, being more active during low-load tasks and less active during high-load tasks requiring executive control. Meditation practices entail various degrees of cognitive control. Thus, DMN activation patterns could give insight into the nature of meditation practices. This 10-week...
Brain oscillatory activity is associated with different cognitive processes and plays a critical role in meditation. In this study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of oscillatory changes during Sahaj Samadhi meditation (a concentrative form of meditation that is part of Sudarshan Kriya yoga). EEG was recorded during Sudarshan Kriya yoga meditation for meditators and relaxation for...
The nature of the 'self' and self-referential awareness has been one of the most debated issues in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Understanding the neurocognitive bases of self-related representation and processing is also crucial to research on the neural correlates of consciousness. The distinction between an 'I', corresponding to a subjective sense of the self as a...