In recent years there has been a resumption of research into the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelic1 drugs such as MDMA2, psilocybin and LSD3. Clinical research suggests significant efficacy for psychiatric disorders that have traditionally been hard to treat. The evidence base has accumulated to the point that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy appears to be moving from a fringe...
Mahler, who had mobilized the youth of his day against slovenly Tradition, reerupted into a newly youthful popular culture in the 1960s thanks to both the centenary of his birth and the advent of the long-playing record. Not only musicians were touched by the wave of new recordings; modern pop culture and youthful “avant-garde” now blithely bridged the once-opposed realms of “high” and “low”...
In her article, “Microphenomenology of Chronicity in Psychosomatic Diseases: Diabetes, Anorexia, and Schizophrenia,” the renowned French phenomenologist Natalie Depraz reflects upon chronicity as a category that might be common to different forms of chronic diseases. In my comment I will first summarize Depraz's analysis, which will then allow me to elaborate on some open questions that her...
T here is a natural desire to explain the development of cognitive phenomena that seem particularly characteristic of the human mind. Creativity is a case in point, consciousness another. A recent archaeological project has attempted to understand evidence from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in relation to the emergence of both consciousness and creativity at the dawn of settled life. This...
REM dreams and NREM dreams differ in terms of content and phenomenologies, these two dream types do not exhaust dream phenomenology. Relative to REM dreams, NREM dreams tend to be less story-like, bizarre, and contain fewer aggressive social interactions and greater numbers of friendly interactions, at least where the dreamer-initiated interactions are concerned.
In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many...
This textbook connects the big ideas and key thinkers of psychology and philosophy in a clear and cohesive theoretical narrative. Students are led to understand the relations between different schools of thought, and to connect the various thinkers, theories and facts in psychology's history. Focusing on the major ideas that have reoccurred throughout history, such as the mind-body problem and...
This textbook connects the big ideas and key thinkers of psychology and philosophy in a clear and cohesive theoretical narrative. Students are led to understand the relations between different schools of thought, and to connect the various thinkers, theories and facts in psychology's history. Focusing on the major ideas that have reoccurred throughout history, such as the mind-body problem and...
In the past ten years, graph theory has been widely employed in the study of natural and technological phenomena. The representation of the relationships among the units of a network allow for a quantitative analysis of its overall structure, beyond what can be understood by considering only a few units. Here we discuss the application of graph theory to psychiatric diagnosis of psychoses and...
Delusions, in their many different manifestations, are central to the concepts of madness and psychosis. Yet what causes them remains in many ways a complete mystery. McKenna's Delusions is the first comprehensive attempt to tackle one of the most arresting phenomena in psychiatry: an in-depth and critical review of what delusions are, the forms they can take and how they might be explained...
Introduction Early Christian mysticism customarily has been understood as a relatively late Platonic philosophical product of patristic theology, marked particularly by Denys the Areopagite (also known as Pseudo-Dionysius, he is thought to have written ca. 500 CE). Denys taught the apophatic way, in which the soul escapes the world to unite with the Unknowable God. The first generations of...
Throughout history, in almost every society, persons have claimed to experience God or some ultimate reality in the same sort of immediate way that they experience physical objects through their senses. Their experiences have been quite diverse, running the gamut from extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences of some underlying unity into which the experient is totally or partially...
Of the three faculties of subjectivity, the empirical case for quantum cognition is the strongest. In the past decade a rapidly growing body of scholarship has emerged at the intersection of mathematical psychology and physics that not only models cognition in explicitly quantum terms, but has rigorously tested these models as well. While it remains to be seen how mainstream psychologists will...
The thrust of the last two chapters was ever more micro, beginning with quantum brains and then projecting the essence of their subjectivity all the way down to the sub-atomic level. While that might seem to have taken us very far from the world of social science, I am working toward just the opposite conclusion: that social life is not essentially different from that of sub-atomic particles....
Introduction We saw in Part I that in addition to explaining consciousness there is another hard problem for the modern scientific worldview – understanding what quantum physics is telling us about reality. And if anything this one is harder. In philosophy of mind there is at least consensus enough for an orthodox position to exist (materialism), and a widespread expectation that it will be...
The dominant model of man in naturalistic social science today is materialist, ontologically deterministic, and mechanistic. At least it is no longer behaviorist too; although behavioralism remains strong, almost all social scientists agree that human behavior is affected by unobservable intentional states that must be dealt with as best we can. Yet while it is recognized that people have...
1. On the road to anti-structure: V., The Crying Lot 49 and the Beats 2. Love, violence and yippie subversion in Gravity's Rainbow: Pynchon and the New Left 3. The psychedelic movement, fantasy and anarchism in The Crying Lot 49 and Against the Day 4. The Black Panther Party, revolutionary suicide and Gravity's Rainbow 5. Feminism moderate and radical in The Crying Lot 49 and Vineland: Pynchon...
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THE PROBLEM The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar...
This chapter updates our knowledge of the short- and long-term effects of cannabis on cognition based on integrating evidence from the most recent literature on this topic. Numerous studies have examined the acute effects of cannabis on human cognition. Cannabis induces perceptual distortions and impairs memory and concentration during acute intoxication. Studies of long-term and heavy cannabis...
Primordial sense of embodied self-unity Infancy research of the past forty years defies long-held ideas regarding the starting state of mental life. These ideas were justified by the fact that we do not have any explicit recollection of our own infancy. Infantile amnesia was symptomatic of an initial absence of experiential unity and self-awareness. Prior to language, children were regarded as...
The body is the means by which we interact and communicate with one another, and as such it both connects us to one another and conveys fundamental social information about us, including personal identity as well as general characteristics like age, gender, and social roles, and psychological characteristics such as intentions, feelings, and attitudes. Although our own bodies are in the...
We are certainly born with a body, but are we also born with a body in our brain? The four chapters that deal with the development of body representations in the present volume touch upon a timely issue in developmental psychology, cognitive and experimental psychology, and cognitive neurosciences. Back in the old days of the cognitive revolution, multisensory processing and sensorimotor...
Hughes’s poetry from his first book to the last can be regarded as expressing one poet’s personal myth of his quest for what Keith Sagar has called ‘healing truths’ that both he himself and his society needed. For Hughes the poet, one way of achieving such insights is by taking a shamanistic approach to thinking and writing about animals. In one of his letters to Moelwyn Merchant in 1990,...
Introduction Within the past few decades, the nature of consciousness has become a central issue in neuroscience, and it is increasingly the focus of both theoretical and empirical work. Studying consciousness is vital to developing an understanding of human perception and behavior, of our relationships with one another, and of our relationships with other potentially conscious animals....