Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 2001
Thomas Natsoulas
The feeling aspect that, according to James, every state of consciousness possesses—what is it and what is its function? From a previous article, I continue here an effort to spell out how the feeling aspect and a cognitive aspect—which, too, was proposed to characterize all pulses of mentality—belong together to a single integral whole. Every state of consciousness is both a feeling and a...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2000
Thomas Natsoulas
Blindsight research provides an opportunity to place James's account of consciousness in an empirical context that is attracting much comment from psychologists. Recently, I briefly indicated some lines along which the neurological phenomenon of blindsight—which results from visual-cortical lesions—is interpretable in keeping with James's conception of the stream in The Principles of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1999
Andrzej Kokoszka
9 citations
Superficially Altered States of Consciousness (SACS) and Profoundly Altered States of Consciousness (PASC) are described as a result of analyses of results of a questionnaire survey of 295 subjects—adolescents and adults. The comparison of the experiences accompanying these states indicates that SASC are characterized by disturbances in experiencing the reality, one's self, and in cognitive...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1999
Thomas Natsoulas
This article develops the concluding section of a previous article of mine, which briefly contrasted William James's views on consciousness in The Principles with those of Susanne K. Langer in her own magnum opus. This comparative approach allows me to bring out vividly the fact that James's discussion of consciousness seeks to express a non-egological conception of the subject matter. James...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1999
Thomas Natsoulas
I continue to pursue an understanding of the state-appropriative acts, which are introduced in the immediately preceding article of the present series. I inquire here into James's concept of appropriation, which refers to one of the main functions that the state-appropriative acts are proposed uniquely to perform. These states of consciousness turn around, so to speak, upon the stream itself,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1998
Thomas Natsoulas
From within the stream of consciousness, according to William James, there take place very frequently acts of “appropriation” to oneself of other basic durational components of the stream. Some components are thus “owned,” but some are “disowned”; also, “assent” is bestowed on the contents of some states of consciousness, whereas others may be rejected as false or unacceptable. At one point,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1998
Barbara L. Easterlin, Etzel Cardeña
This study compared perceived stress and cognitive and emotional differences between two groups of Buddhist mindfulness meditators. Nineteen beginning and twenty-four advanced meditators carried electronic pagers for five days and responded to daily random signals by completing an Experience Sampling form (ESF) containing items related to the dependent variables. As compared with beginners,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1998
Antonio Zadra, Shannon A. O'Brien, D. C. Donderi
A multivariate comparison was made among fifty-two recurrent, past-recurrent, and nonrecurrent dreamers aged eighteen to twenty-one. The participants completed measures of well-being and collected a fourteen-day sample of their own remembered dreams. Multivariate analysis showed that recurrent dreamers scored low on psychological well-being and reported more negative dream content. As was true...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1998
Thomas Natsoulas
By examining work published in this Journal, I bring present-day issues to bear on my ongoing exploration of William James's stream of consciousness. How do knowledgeable psychological scientists demonstrate or acknowledge the relevance to their own work of their illustrious predecessor's introspectively grounded theses and arguments? In installments number XV, XVI, and XVII of the present...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1998
Thomas Natsoulas
By addressing work on consciousness that has been published in this journal, I bring contemporary material to bear on my ongoing exploration of William James's stream. How do psychologists of the present day demonstrate or acknowledge the relevance of their great predecessor's introspectively grounded theses and arguments to their own work? I am considering the first fifteen volumes of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1997
Thomas Natsoulas
Addressing work on consciousness published in this Journal allows me to bring relevant present-day material to bear on my ongoing exploration of James's stream. Instead of, as before, making use of an author's findings or ideas to improve our understanding of James's stream, I inquire into what each author has explicitly drawn from James's work in his or her article. I consider all fifteen...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1997
Thomas Natsoulas
The present installment in this series of articles continues in consideration of the role that bodily self-awareness plays in the very structure of the basic durational components constituting William James's stream of consciousness. The focus here is dual, on both the prominent phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch's account of this role and on James's account. Critically addressed is Gurwitsch's...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1997
Thomas Natsoulas
According to William James, bodily self-awareness (bodily feeling) is pervasive throughout the stream of consciousness; such awareness is included in each and every pulse of mentality that makes up the stream of consciousness. This installment of the present series of articles begins to consider the role that bodily self-awareness plays in the very structure of the basic durational components...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1996
Thomas Natsoulas
Consciousness and self-awareness—how are they mutually related? This contribution to the present series of articles begins to consider replies to this question from the Jamesian perspective of The Principles. First, several relevant senses of consciousness are made explicit. Then, I give attention to James's notion of personal consciousness: How do the basic durational components of a stream of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1995
Thomas Natsoulas
As in the preceding article of the present series, I continue to examine William James's thought in The Principles of Psychology regarding what he there called “ejective consciousness.” James held that, in certain altered states, and perhaps at other times as well, mental occurrences may take place that are not components of the individual's original stream of consciousness. Usually if not...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1995
Peter L. Nelson
Although the Tellegen Absorption Scale has been widely employed in recent years as a measure of personality Trait Absorption, it is argued that this simple score does not sufficiently discriminate true capacity for Absorption nor does it reveal the level of opportunity made for absorptive experiencing. This study operationalizes Capacity and Opportunity as two additional subscales appended to...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1995
Thomas Natsoulas
The present series concerning the stream of consciousness continues with two articles that examine James's conception of “ejective” consciousness in The Principles. During certain altered states, and perhaps at other times as well, mental-occurrence instances take place that are not part of the individual's original stream of consciousness. Usually, if not always, such “split-off”...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1994
Peter L. Nelson
This article argues that the so-called cannabis “amotivation syndrome,” widely reported in the literature, may not be a single nosological entity, but represent, instead, a change in cognitive style emerging as a result of cannabis's ability to facilitate a unique attentional state favoured by those who have a higher than average level of a personality factor referred to as “trait absorption.”...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1993
Thomas Natsoulas
Implicitly and later explicitly, James understood the stream of consciousness to consist of a sequence of temporally adjacent pulses of consciousness (except for time gaps when consciousness stops). Gibson claimed James's stream amounts to a stream of self-consciousness since it includes “a travelling moment of present time.” Reference to the present, according to Gibson, depends on the...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1993
Andrzej Kokoszka
This article presents a model, created on the basis of Freud's model of “structural relations of mental personality”, and also an evolutionary model of the main states of consciousness [1–4]. A terminological order is proposed to promote the consistent understanding of such notions as: consciousness, awareness, self-consciousness, and self-unconsciousness. The final version of the evolutionary...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1993
Thomas Natsoulas
In this second article of a series that examines from various perspectives the phenomenon that James called “the stream of consciousness,” I continue to argue that James's implicit account of the stream was not consistent with how he advertised it in The Principles. James's stream was more analogous to a train, with tightly adjacent successive components, than to a stream of water. Additional...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1993
Andrzej Kokoszka
8 citations
In a questionnaire survey waking altered states of consciousness (ASC) are found to be common among 174 Polish students. The experience of Superficially Altered States of Consciousness (SACS) was reported by 96 percent of subjects and more than half of them had such experiences often. Whereas an experience of Profoundly Altered States of Consciousness (PASC) was confirmed by 75 percent and...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1992
Thomas Natsoulas
It is argued here that William James's famous stream of consciousness, as he addressed it in The Principles of Psychology, is not after all analogous to a stream or river of water, but rather it consists of a succession of discrete instances or states of consciousness. Already in 1890, James had implicitly arrived at his later explicit conception of consciousness as made up of individual...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1992
Tore Nielsen
Upright Napping is a procedure for observing and recording spontaneous hypnagogic imagery. It employs systematic self-observation and recording of imagery that occurs when one falls asleep in an upright seated position. Seventy-one hypnagogic images collected by the author over twenty-nine napping sessions were assessed for occurrence of illusory movements of the self and of other characters,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1991
Joseph Glicksohn, Gailie Friedland, Avi Salach-Nachum
We report the results of systematic self-observation of entoptics and hypnagogia, in a study whose purpose was to investigate the “entoptic explanation” of hypnagogic imagery (i.e., that entoptic phenomena play a role in the genesis of visual hypnagogic imagery). Employing various experimental manipulations designed to increase the incidence of both phenomena, we were able to show the...