Open MIND
July 20, 2026
Numan Ahmad
This is the a priori protocol for a scoping review (JBI methodology; PRISMA-ScR reporting) mapping evidence on (1) the measurement of psychedelic-occasioned mystical/spiritual experience and its association with clinical outcomes, and (2) classic serotonergic psychedelics for body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive-spectrum conditions, interpreted through the osteopathic...
Open MIND
July 19, 2026
Bruno Costa Tonetto
Abstract: Under analytic idealism, individual minds are dissociated perspectives within a broader field of consciousness. This essay asks what structural features such individuation must exhibit — and identifies two structural axes any dissociative boundary must vary along: how much it admits from the field, and how well what it admits is organized into coherent experience. Treated elsewhere as...
Open MIND
July 19, 2026
Eirini Karakasidou, Athina Komninou, Markella Kotzia
Study type: Randomized, controlled, parallel-group trial (retrospective registration; data collection already complete). Rationale/Background: University students training in psychology face elevated academic and emotional demands that place them at risk for stress, anxiety, and depression. This study examined whether a brief self-compassion and mindfulness training program could improve...
Open MIND
July 17, 2026
Shiva Rajavelu
This project archives Paper 1 of the Contemplative Neuroscience Research Programme. The manuscript develops a theoretical and testable framework for examining prolonged contemplative isolation as a convergent multivariable intervention capable of altering neural noise, brain dynamics, and functional dominance—and, as a bounded speculative extension, sensitivity to ordinarily masked biological...
Open MIND
July 16, 2026
Sepehr Shokouhi
Panpsychism promises to escape the puzzle of consciousness emerging from wholly experience-less matter by admitting experience at reality's most fundamental layer, but it inherits an unfinished difficulty of its own: the combination problem, how the aggregation of micro-experiences yields a single, unified macro-experience. Building on an ontological framework formulated elsewhere, this paper...
Open MIND
July 15, 2026
Jeremy Clements
Recent interpretability research from Anthropic (July 2026) reports that Claude language models contain a small, privileged set of internal representations — the "J-space" — functioning analogously to the global workspace posited by global workspace theory as the mechanism of conscious access in humans. The structure emerged during training rather than being engineered. Because this finding is...
Open MIND
July 14, 2026
Christina Chwyl, Jason B. Luoma, Stephanie R. Rodriguez et al.
PTSD is a prevalent and debilitating condition, for which many individuals do not seek or complete treatment. As new PTSD treatments are being evaluated, such as psychedelic-assisted therapies, it’s important to understand the preferences of individuals for whom these treatments are being developed. To date, no research has directly compared preferences for psychedelic-assisted therapies...
Open MIND
July 14, 2026
Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ajarn Shaman Shu, Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal et al.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Authors: Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ph.D. | Ajarn Shaman Shu | Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal | Robert Shumake, Ph.D. Affiliation: Buddha University® & Orisha University This paper offers a comprehensive, initiated insider reinterpretation of Patañjali's eightfold system (aṣṭāṅga) through a Dravidian-Tamil Siddha lens, placing the Yoga Sutras in conversation with South...
Open MIND
July 14, 2026
Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ajarn Shaman Shu, Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal et al.
Shiva Mind Authors: Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ph.D. | Ajarn Shaman Shu | Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal | Robert Shumake, Ph.D. Affiliation: Buddha University® & Orisha University This article presents the central arguments and scholarly context of Shiva Mind, a collaborative monograph that advances a theology and phenomenology of "Shiva consciousness" as cosmic mind, situated within Dravidian...
Open MIND
July 14, 2026
Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ajarn Shaman Shu, Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal et al.
Ganesha: Break the Chain Authors: Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola, Ph.D. | Ajarn Shaman Shu | Shri Suryanarayana Swamikal | Robert Shumake, Ph.D. Affiliation: Buddha University® & Orisha University This article presents a scholarly exposition and critical framing of the book Ganesha: Break the Chain by the present authors, a work that proposes a cross-cultural, practice-based paradigm for breaking...
Open MIND
July 13, 2026
Vassilis Martiadis, Fabiola Raffone
In acute trials of intravenous and intranasal ketamine/esketamine, the rapid anti-suicidal effect appears to be at least partly independent of the overall antidepressant response. That question has, to our knowledge, never been examined in a real-world esketamine cohort followed for six months, nor in a sample enriched for comorbid borderline personality disorder (BPD), a population excluded...
Open MIND
July 9, 2026
Luke Baxter
Using serum samples collected from the PsiDeR trial—a randomised, double‑blind, placebo‑controlled study of a single 25 mg dose of psilocybin for treatment‑resistant depression (protocol: BMJ Open 2021;11:e056091)—we will investigate whether inflammatory marker trajectories and baseline inflammatory status are associated with antidepressant response at week 3 (endpoint). The inflammatory...
Open MIND
July 9, 2026
Emma Wiethoff, Barbara Breitenstein, Nina Hartter et al.
This preregistration specifies hypotheses and an analysis plan for a randomized controlled trial comparing Conscious Connected Breathing (CCB) with Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) in adults with a history of childhood adversity. The primary outcome is change in self-compassion from pre- to post-intervention. Secondary analyses examine whether altered states of consciousness during CCB...
Open MIND
July 6, 2026
Iris Liu, Jeremy I Skipper
We aim to explore and qualitatively compare individuals’ experiences of mental imagery during waking and dreaming consciousness in order to understand how these states are similar and different in phenomenological structure, focusing on the sensory modalities that are different or common between states. Additionally, we seek to better understand how absent or low waking visual imagery might...
Open MIND
July 5, 2026
Erico de Lima Azevedo, Nathália Perin
This paper applies the information fields physical theory to the problem of the dream, proposing that a dream is the geometric projection, at the level of conscious image, of the dreamer's energetic state as constituted by the field in which the living organism stands. The account is offered as a third path between the two verdicts that have divided dream research — the dream as meaningful...
Open MIND
July 2, 2026
Keith R. Laws, Paul M. Jenkinson, Daniel Fray et al.
Disturbances of self-experience have long been regarded as a core feature of schizophrenia. Classical psychopathological accounts described disruptions in the sense of self, agency, and bodily ownership as central to the disorder (Bleuler, 1911), while contemporary phenomenological approaches conceptualise schizophrenia as involving disturbances of the “minimal self” or pre-reflective sense of...
Open MIND
July 1, 2026
Michiel van Elk
This project investigates how the context of a live concert — including prior expectations, personality, and acute psychoactive substance use — shapes intense emotional and altered-state responses to music, specifically feelings of awe and wonder, mystical-type experiences, and aesthetic chills. The study is part of an ongoing programme of research at the Leiden University PRSM Lab into peak...
Open MIND
July 1, 2026
Beth Saunders
In 2022, Special Collections at the University of Maryland,Baltimore County received the extraordinary gift of one of theworld’s largest archival and book collections devoted toparapsychology and psychic phenomena from theParapsychology Foundation. Named for the foundation’s cofounder, the famed trance medium Eileen J. Garrett(1892-1970), the collection of books, periodicals,photographs, and...
Open MIND
July 1, 2026
Christina Chwyl, Ryan Cook, Devin Gregoire
Data from the Open Psychedelic Evaluation Nexus (OPEN), which runs an ongoing single-arm prospective longitudinal cohort study of safety and outcomes for individuals receiving state-regulated psilocybin services.
Open MIND
June 30, 2026
Paweł Krzysztof Chomiuk
This paper investigates the minimal functional organization required for local full self- representation, understood as the capacity of a local configuration to determine its own relational state without reference to anything external. Rather than presupposing a tri- adic structure, we begin from three explicit ontological commitments adopted within the OTWOFDN framework: (i) the defining...
Open MIND
June 28, 2026
Hannah van Dijken, Renee Ireland, James Fowler et al.
This scoping review investigates the conceptual production and governance of psychedelic integration across a broad spectrum of institutional and cultural logics. While the term is increasingly central to psychedelic practice, it remains conceptually ambiguous, with definitions and practices varying significantly across clinical trials, therapeutic frameworks, and naturalistic settings. The...
Open MIND
June 27, 2026
Zhang Pan
The “hard problem” of consciousness remains unresolved because existing paradigms operate within the presupposition that “consciousness is a product of matter.” The Yuanling Theory proposed in this paper represents a fundamental ontological reconceptualization of the nature of consciousness. The ontological subject of consciousness is termed Yuanling, which is defined as an energy-information...
Open MIND
June 27, 2026
Dan Gabriel Cimpoeru
GEC++ is a formal theory of phenomenal consciousness built on six jointly necessary conditions — CSMI, RII, TBI, EI, TCI, and AVI — integrated via a geometric mean with a zero-collapse property. The framework is validated through 520+ computational simulations across 37 experimental groups and applied directly to large language model architecture, identifying three structural gaps and proposing...
Open MIND
June 26, 2026
Max Courtney
Substance use disorders (SUDs) represent a persistent global public health burden for which existing pharmacological and behavioral interventions show limited long-term efficacy across various patient populations (Sinha, 2011). Psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) has reemerged as a promising therapeutic treatment approach and has had renewed clinical interest with a growing amount of research...
Open MIND
June 25, 2026
Moritz-Maximilian Harbig, Heidi Mauersberger
This preregistered online experiment (n ≈ 200) investigates whether a brief Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), compared to an active breath-focus control condition, increases affective empathy and reduces hostile attribution bias (HAB) toward persons depicted in ambiguous norm-violating social situations. Stimulus materials consist of 12 vignettes paired with standardized Anger-Sadness morph...