Progress in Brain Research
2019
Ratna Jyothi Kakumanu, Ajay Kumar Nair, Arun Sasidharan et al.
Several studies have demonstrated that meditation naïve subjects can, in just a few weeks, become proficient enough in meditation to show cognitive improvements accompanied with functional and structural changes in the brain. Would long-term exposure to qualitatively different levels of meditative training bring about differences in cognitive processing? Would meditation prior to task...
Progress in Brain Research
2018
Danilo de Gregorio, Justine P. Enns, Nicolas A. Nunez et al.
95 citations
Depression and anxiety are psychiatric diagnoses commonly associated with low quality of life and low percentage of responsiveness by patients treated with currently available drugs. Thus, research into alternative compounds to treat these disorders is essential to guarantee a patient's remission. The last decade has witnessed a revamped interest for the application of psychedelic medicine for...
Progress in Brain Research
2018
John Martin Corkery
62 citations
Ibogaine is an indole alkaloid found in the root bark of the Iboga shrub native to west Africa possessing hallucinogenic properties. For centuries it has been used in religious ceremonies and to gain spiritual enlightenment. However, since the early 1960s, its apparent ability to reduce craving for psychoactive substances including alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, opiates, and nicotine has...
Progress in Brain Research
2018
Joseph P Barsuglia, Martin Polanco, Robert Palmer et al.
37 citations
Ibogaine is a plant-derived alkaloid and dissociative psychedelic that demonstrates anti-addictive properties with several substances of abuse, including alcohol. 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a naturally occurring psychedelic known to occasion potent mystical-type experiences and also demonstrates anti-addictive properties. The potential therapeutic effects of both compounds...
Progress in Brain Research
2018
Felix Müller, Matthias E. Liechti, Undine E. Lang et al.
32 citations
The effects of hallucinogenic drugs on the human brain have been studied since the earliest days of neuroimaging in the 1990s. However, approaches are often hard to compare and results are heterogeneous. In this chapter, we summarize studies investigating the effects of hallucinogens on the resting brain, with a special emphasis on replicability and limitations. In previous studies,...
Progress in Brain Research
2018
K. Murnane
Human research with psychedelics is making groundbreaking discoveries. Psychedelics modify enduring elements of personality and seemingly reduce anxiety, depression, and substance dependence in small but well-designed clinical studies. Psychedelics are advancing through pharmaceutical regulatory systems, and neuroimaging studies have related their extraordinary effects to select brain networks....
Progress in Brain Research
2018
Tanya Calvey, Fleur M Howells
This chapter is an introduction to the volume "Psychedelic Neuroscience" of Elsevier's Progress in Brain Research addressing the neurobiological mechanisms of psychedelic drugs, the resulting changes in brain activity and integration of traditional viewpoints. As the field is relatively new, there are discrepancies in the literature related to classification, composition and effects of the...
Progress in Brain Research
2009
Neil Levy, Julian Savulescu
62 citations
Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many...
Progress in Brain Research
2009
Melanie Boly, Marcello Massimini, Giulio Tononi
50 citations
Assessing the level of consciousness of noncommunicative brain-damaged patients is difficult, as one has to make inferences based on the patients' behavior. However, behavioral responses of brain-damaged patients are usually limited not only by their cognitive dysfunctions, but also by their frequent motor impairment. For these reasons, it is essential to resort to para-clinical markers of the...
Progress in Brain Research
2009
Antonino Raffone, Narayanan Srinivasan
While enormous progress has been made to identify neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), crucial NCC aspects are still very controversial. A major hurdle is the lack of an adequate definition and characterization of different aspects of conscious experience and also its relationship to attention and metacognitive processes like monitoring. In this paper, we therefore attempt to develop a...
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Dhananjay V Chavan
The chapter reviews certain practical aspects related to Vipassana , a first-person method taught by the Buddha, to probe one's stream of conscious experience, its contents and related material events. Although references to Vipassana are found scattered throughout the Pali literature the most comprehensive and detailed account with regard to its practice is contained in the Satipatthana Sutta....
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Rahul Banerjee
The chapter reviews a classical Indian model of consciousness found in the Abhidhamma, a collection of seven treatises in the Pali Canon Tipitaka. The model was based on observations made during advanced vipassana practice, a first-person method taught by the Buddha. The climax of the model consists in the elucidation of 24 'Bridging Relations' causally linking the stream of consciousness, its...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Christopher C. French
70 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have become the focus of much interest in the last 30 years or so. Such experiences can occur both when individuals are objectively near to death and also when they simply believe themselves to be. The experience typically involves a number of different components including a feeling of peace and well-being, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), entering a region of...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Lionel Naccache
13 citations
The scientific study of the cerebral substrate of consciousness has been marked by significant recent achievements, resulting partially from an interaction between the exploration of cognition in both brain-damaged patients and healthy subjects. Several neuropsychological syndromes contain marked dissociations that permit the identification of principles related to the neurophysiology of...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Silvia Bünning, Olaf Blanke
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are defined as experiences in which a person seems to be awake and sees his body and the world from a location outside his physical body. More precisely, they can be defined by the presence of the following three phenomenological characteristics: (i) disembodiment (location of the self outside one's body); (ii) the impression of seeing the world from an elevated...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Igor Aleksander
The work from several laboratories on the modeling of consciousness is reviewed. This ranges, on one hand, from purely functional models where behavior is important and leads to an attribution of consciousness to, on the other hand, material work closely derived from the information about the anatomy of the brain. At the functional end of the spectrum, applications are described specifically...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Bernard J. Baars
Global workspace (GW) theory emerged from the cognitive architecture tradition in cognitive science. Newell and co-workers were the first to show the utility of a GW or "blackboard" architecture in a distributed set of knowledge sources, which could cooperatively solve problems that no single constituent could solve alone. The empirical connection with conscious cognition was made by Baars...