Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Tore Nielsen
1 citation
The fleeting dream images of sleep onset afford a rare glimpse at how experience is transformed from the perceptually grounded consciousness of wakefulness to the hallucinatory simulations of dreaming. These images, or microdreams, are briefer, simpler, and more accessible to phenomenological scrutiny than are the long REM dreams traditionally recorded in the sleep lab. This chapter shows that...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Erin J. Wamsley
Dreaming has often been viewed as a “mysterious” experience entirely distinct from waking cognition. An alternative view proposes that dreams are generated by the same fundamental processes that give rise to spontaneous thought during wakefulness. New evidence suggests that these processes include activity of the brain’s memory systems, supporting consolidation of newly encoded experience....
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Elizaveta Solomonova
Sleep paralysis is an experience of being temporarily unable to move or talk during the transitional periods between sleep and wakefulness: at sleep onset or upon awakening. The feeling of paralysis may be accompanied by a variety of vivid and intense sensory experiences, including mentation in visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, as well as a distinct feeling of presence. This chapter...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Jennifer Windt, Ursula Voss
Dreams are sometimes described as an intensified form of spontaneous waking thought. Lucid dreams may seem to be a counterexample, because metacognitive insight into the fact that one is now dreaming is often associated with the ability to deliberately control the ongoing dream. This chapter uses conceptual considerations and empirical research findings to argue that lucid dreaming is in fact a...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Halvor Eifring
For more than two millennia, contemplative traditions across the Eurasian continent have seen spontaneous thought as a distraction that binds the devout to the phenomenal world, clogs the gateway to fundamental aspects of reality, and is used by demons to tempt the pious away from their prayer or meditation. At the same time, many traditions have believed the fruits of contemplative practice to...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Zachary C. Irving, Evan Thompson
This chapter provides an introduction to the philosophy of mind-wandering. It begins with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated thought or stimulus-independent thought. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto center stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations....
Oxford Handbooks Online
October 5, 2017
Helen Y. Weng, Brianna S. Schuyler, Richard J. Davidson
Compassion meditation is a form of mental training that cultivates compassion towards oneself and other people, and is thought to result in greater prosocial behavior in real-world settings. This framework views compassion as a quality that can be trained, rather than a stable trait, and scientists have started testing these hypotheses using neuroscientific and objective behavioral methods. How...
Oxford Handbooks Online
June 6, 2017
William F. Bristow
Chapter 5 displays narrative unity in the “Reason chapter” of Hegel’s Phenomenology by showing how consciousness as reason becomes, and takes successive forms as, purposive activity: first, as organism, then, as end-directed human action, and finally, as human action that is its own end. The successive forms of purposive activity in the chapter are generated as attempts to resolve the...
Oxford Handbooks Online
October 5, 2016
Mark R. Leary, Kirk Warren Brown, Kate J. Diebels
3 citations
This chapter examines the cognitive, motivational, emotional, and interpersonal characteristics that distinguish hypo-egoic from egoic individuals and speculates about the origins of these differences. Cognitively, hypo-egoic people tend to be more focused on stimuli in the present moment, which they process in an experiential fashion with minimal internal commentary. They also tend to be less...
Oxford Handbooks Online
June 2, 2016
Christian Coseru
In challenging the physicalist conception of consciousness advanced by Cārvāka materialists such as Bṛhaspati, the Buddhist philosopher Śāntarakṣita addresses a series of key issues about the nature of causality and the basis of cognition. This chapter considers whether causal accounts of generation for material bodies are adequate in explaining how conscious awareness comes to have the...
Oxford Handbooks Online
August 6, 2015
Piotr Balcerowicz
Kundakunda and Umāsvāti are among the first philosophers in Jainism to lay foundations for of Jaina philosophy of mind. A key concept in their philosophy of mind is that of a cognitive faculty, located in and constitutive of the self. Cognitive faculties should be understood as processes or manners through which the self makes use of the physical sensory apparatus, as well as the actual...
Oxford Handbooks Online
July 1, 2014
Andrew C. Papanicolaou
This chapter addresses and reconciles often conflicting conclusions published in the professional functional neuroimaging literature regarding the neuronal networks that may mediate consciousness viewed as a function, as well as neuronal circuits that represent specific products of that function, such as concepts, percepts, and experiences that are also referred to as the “contents” or the...
Oxford Handbooks Online
September 5, 2013
Tim Bayne
It is often said that the normal unity of consciousness fragments, and perhaps even breaks down entirely, in psychiatric disorders. This chapter examines ways in which the unity-or, better, unities-of consciousness might be lost in the context of psychiatric disorders, such as multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, and depersonalization.
Oxford Handbooks Online
May 1, 2012
Lawrence A. Shapiro
8 citations
The article explains the history, core concepts, methodological practices, and future prospects of embodied cognition. Cognitivism treats cognition, including perception, as a constructive process in which computational operations transform a static representation into a goal state. Cognition begins with an input representation so that the psychological subject can be conceived as a passive...