Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 14, 2011
Edward F Pace-Schott
3 citations
Among sleep stages, awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep produce the greatest number and reported intensity of dream reports. Dreaming is a conscious state that lacks the insight and cognitive control typical of healthy waking but allows the remarkable emergence of coherent narrative, vivid visual imagery, strong emotion, and sometimes never-before-experienced elements. Similar to...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 14, 2011
Birendra Nath Mallick, Asok Mukhopadhyay
2 citations
Dreams have been known to mankind from time immemorial, while rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) has been objectively defined by characteristic electrophysiological signals since the mid twentieth century only. In the absence of better objective criteria, modern experimental sleep neurobiologists have objectively identified the dream state of a subject with REMS; thus, the dream state and REMS...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 14, 2011
Milton Kramer
1 citation
The need to study dreaming is the promise that it will unlock the mystery of psychosis and perhaps contribute to resolving the mind–body problem. A number of questions arise in the study of dreams. Can dreams be reliably measured? Do dreams reflect differences where we know psychological differences exist? Do dreams change when there is a change in the state of the dreamer? Do dreams change...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 14, 2011
Seiji Nishino
Narcolepsy is characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), cataplexy, and/or other dissociated manifestations of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (hypnagogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis). The major pathophysiology of human narcolepsy has been recently elucidated based on the discovery of narcolepsy genes in animals. Using forward (i.e., positional cloning in canine narcolepsy) and...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 27, 2011
Russell T. Hurlburt
“Karen” sample 3.1. Karen was studying for her psychology test. At the moment of the beep she was seeing the words “abuse treatment,” which were experienced to be inside her head, toward the front, as if the point of view was in the back of her head and the words were projected in front of her. The words were seen in bubble letter font, all lower case, and had thin black edges as sketched in...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 27, 2011
Russell T. Hurlburt
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. – Francis Bacon In Chapter 5, we noticed this constraint: The exploration of pristine experience has to be iterative . As we turn the screw ever more securely into the notion of faithfully apprehending experience, it's time to return to that constraint,...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 27, 2011
Russell T. Hurlburt
A few years ago, a world-class consciousness scientist engaged me in an e-mail and telephone conversation about the exploration of inner experience. He knew of my DES work, found it interesting but problematic, and wanted to know more about it. We eventually agreed that he should wear the DES beeper and I would interview him by telephone – then he would know about the process first hand. For a...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
May 12, 2011
Barry Windeatt
2 citations
It is a modern commonplace that the English fifteenth century – although an age of such flamboyant achievements in many of the arts – was a time of intellectual and spiritual repression, regulation and censorship, fearful of heresy and of innovation alike. Within this overstated larger picture of the age, modern assessment of contemplative life and literature in the fifteenth century becomes...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
April 7, 2011
Walter Hopp
4 citations
There are three main and interrelated tasks involved in spelling out the role of perception in knowledge. The first is to determine whether perceptual experiences justify beliefs. The second is to say why they do (or do not do) so. The third, assuming that experiences justify beliefs, is to specify how they do so. In the present chapter I will attempt to do all three, with special emphasis on...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
March 31, 2011
Rudolf N. Cardinal, Edward Thomas Bullmore
Sensory deprivation and impairment from 1 - The causes of psychosis Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2011 Rudolf N. Cardinal andEdward T. Bullmore Show author details Rudolf N. Cardinal Affiliation: University of Cambridge Edward T.
Cambridge University Press eBooks
January 6, 2011
Wesley J Wildman
INTRODUCTION Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture was recently launched with great fanfare, thanks to a controversial article in its very first issue. Benny Shanon, a Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a speculative hypothesis about “biblical entheogens” (Shanon 2008). This hypothesis involves Moses ingesting mind-altering...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
January 6, 2011
Wesley J Wildman
INTRODUCTION From the earliest traces of human history to the present there have been technologies of religious and spiritual experience. This chapter is about the form these technologies are likely to take in the near and longer-range future, assuming continuous growth in scientific and cultural understanding rather than civilizational collapse and reversion to less technologized forms of...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
November 22, 2010
Daniel C. Snell
Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us – a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience clearly within its proper bounds. Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still today) that unless there be one...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
September 23, 2010
Carlos Hugh Schenck, Mark W. Mahowald
1 citation
This chapter discusses the case of a 46-year-old female with a 5-year history of distressing, unpleasant and bizarre dreams that occurred from a few times a week to once a month, depending on her stress level. It presents the clinical history, examination, diagnosis, follow-up, general remarks and the results of the procedures performed on the patient. Nocturnal polysomnography (PSG) was...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
September 23, 2010
Michael H. Silber
This chapter discusses the case of a 56-year-old man who presented to the sleep clinic complaining of frequent episodes of feeling paralyzed as he was going to sleep. It presents the clinical history, examination, follow-up, treatment, diagnosis, and the results of the procedures performed on the patient. Examination revealed a pleasant, thin, middle-aged man, in no acute distress, who looked...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
August 5, 2010
J. W. Cook
The great principles of insight meditation are the four foundations of mindfulness. Lord Buddha claims that mindfulness is the only path to purification, freedom from suffering, and thus to nibbāna . This means there is no other practice to purify the mind, escape suffering and reach nibbāna besides the practice of the four foundations of mindfulness. (Phra Ajharn Yai, founder of Wat Bonamron)...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
August 5, 2010
Joanna Cook
In contemporary Thai Buddhism there is massive variation in the foci of Buddhist practice. While some monastic and lay organizations focus on ascetic discipline, others focus on ritual practices, social welfare projects or wealth creation. In Thailand modernist Buddhist movements have elaborated Buddhist responsibilities as both a social concern and a personal responsibility of purification....
Cambridge University Press eBooks
August 5, 2010
Joanna Cook
We have seen in the foregoing that while monastic identity and ascetic practices such as vipassanā meditation have historically been the preserve of monks, requiring full ordination and celibacy, this is not the case in contemporary Thailand. Furthermore, ‘monastic’ and ‘lay’ have never been uncomplicated or mutually exclusive categories in the Thai context. I have argued that the involvement...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 8, 2010
Adela Pinch
In nineteenth-century Britain, the story of thinking about other people was inseparable from the story of the struggle between the different intellectual disciplines that took thinking about other people as their proper business. The tension between psychology and philosophy – overlapping, but increasingly discrete, disciplines – forms a crucial context for this chapter and the next. This...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
July 8, 2010
Adela Pinch
In this chapter, I follow the thread of the previous chapter's investigation of nineteenth-century accounts of mental causation into the later decades of the century. The preceding chapter demonstrated that a focus on consciousness as a form of action could reveal strange philosophical bedfellows in the 1830s – a quirky but compelling idealist such as James Frederick Ferrier, and believers in...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 1, 2010
M. G. F. Martin, Anthony O’Hear
27 citations
Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 1, 2010
Naomi Eilan, Anthony O’Hear
9 citations
A representative expression of current thinking on the ‘problem of consciousness’ runs as follows. There is one, impenetrably hard problem; and a host of soluble, and in this sense easy problems. The hard problem is: how could a physical system yield subjective states? How could there be something it is like to be a physical system? This problem corresponds to a concept of consciousness...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
June 1, 2010
Ned Block, Anthony O’Hear
3 citations
There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H 2 O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
April 22, 2010
James P. Scanlan
1 citation
Aleksei Aleksandrovich Kozlov, who taught at Kiev University, sought to build panpsychism into a comprehensive philosophical system, as did other Russian philosophers who subscribed to it. Two of them who, like Kozlov, deserve credit for the advancement of academic philosophy in tsarist Russia were Lev Mikailovich Lopatin at Moscow University and Nikolai Onufrievich Losskii at St. Petersburg...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
February 18, 2010
R Ellis
11 citations
INTRODUCTION When David Chalmers introduced the notion of the “hard problem of consciousness” (1995), he contributed to a revolution in the neuroscience of consciousness and cognition as well as in the philosophy of mind. The main point of the hard problem is that, even if we could discover the “neural correlates of consciousness,” we still would not have answered the “harder” question: Why do...