Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2012
Anil K. Seth, Keisuke Suzuki, Hugo Critchley
971 citations
Conscious presence—the feeling of being a self located in a here and now—arises when the brain successfully suppresses interoceptive prediction errors via top-down predictions. A theoretical model links presence to the anterior insular cortex (AIC), which compares predicted versus actual bodily signals. When afferent sensory signals are judged as self-generated, predicted interoceptive signals differ from when they are externally caused, connecting presence to agency. The model integrates evidence from predictive coding, dopamine signaling, virtual reality studies, and depersonalization/derealization disorder. It proposes that emotion results from interoceptive inference and offers testable predictions for experiments manipulating both agency and presence.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 9, 2015
Norman A. S. Farb, Jennifer Daubenmier, Cynthia Price et al.
630 citations
Interoception, the sense of internal bodily signals, is essential for embodiment, motivation, and well-being but remains poorly understood. This review integrates perspectives from neuroscience, clinical practice, and contemplative studies, introducing an expanded taxonomy of interoceptive processes. It argues that many of these processes can be explained by a predictive coding model of mind-body integration, which describes tension between expected and felt body sensations. This model parallels contemplative theories and links interoception to affective and psychosomatic disorders. Maladaptive interpretation of bodily sensations may underlie many contemporary maladies, and contemplative practices may reduce these biases, restoring a sense of presence and agency.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Jonathan Smallwood, Jessica R Andrews-Hanna
441 citations
The waking mind frequently generates thoughts unrelated to the present moment, such as mind-wandering or daydreaming, which can interfere with tasks and signal unhappiness or psychiatric issues, yet occupy up to half of our waking time. Under non-demanding conditions, these self-generated thoughts connect past and future selves, aid long-term planning, and inspire creativity. The mind prioritizes such cognition over many other mental acts, suggesting it is a key evolutionary adaptation granting consciousness freedom from the here and now. This synthesis of cognitive and clinical psychology proposes two hypotheses: task context and thought content constrain the costs and benefits of self-generated thought, and an impartial perspective can guide investigation of these costs and benefits.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 4, 2018
Raphaël Millière, Robin Carhart-Harris, Leor Roseman et al.
402 citations
Both meditation and psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD can disrupt the sense of self, but these disruptions are not uniform. Meditation traditions aim to dissolve the self through altered states, while psychedelics produce drug-induced ego dissolution via serotonin receptor agonism. The authors argue that self-consciousness is a multidimensional construct, with narrative aspects (autobiographical memory, self-related thoughts) and embodied aspects (multisensory processes) being differently affected by each. They caution against conflating temporary self-loss with long-term selflessness as a trait, though preliminary evidence suggests possible correlations. The article calls for nuanced understanding of these phenomena.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 24, 2014
Daniel B. Levinson, Eli L. Stoll, Sonam D. Kindy et al.
297 citations
A behavioral measure of mindfulness, breath counting, was validated across four studies involving over 400 participants. Breath counting was reliable, correlated with self-reported mindfulness, distinguished long-term meditators from age-matched controls, and was distinct from measures of sustained attention and working memory. Greater skill in breath counting was associated with more meta-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood, and greater non-attachment. A randomized online training study found that four weeks of breath counting training improved mindfulness and decreased mind wandering compared to working memory training and no training controls. These findings support breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Melanie Boly, Anil K. Seth, Melanie Wilke et al.
295 citations
Consciousness research over the last decade has advanced through evidence that fronto-parietal connectivity and top-down processes enable information to travel across distant cortical areas, and through numerous dissociations between consciousness and cognitive functions such as attention in humans. Mental imagery paradigms now allow identification of covert awareness in non-responsive subjects. In non-human animals, technological enhancements have clarified the roles of cortical areas and higher-order thalamus for consciousness, and progress has been made in understanding non-vertebrate cognition relevant to possible conscious states. Major advances have also occurred in theories of consciousness and their comparison with available evidence.
Frontiers in Psychology
December 13, 2019
Michael Levin
287 citations
Organisms are made of smaller parts—cells, organs, molecular networks—that are themselves competent agents. How do these parts cohere into a single, integrated individual? This paper synthesizes ideas from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology to propose "Scale-Free Cognition": a definition of an individual based on its ability to pursue goals at its own level of organization. Any self is demarcated by a computational surface—the spatiotemporal boundary of events it can measure, model, and affect. Higher-level agency evolves from the primal homeostatic drive to reduce stress, with developmental bioelectricity (electrical networks formed by all cells) providing a plausible gradual path from single-cell homeostasis to memory, prediction, and complex cognition. This hypothesis offers testable predictions for evolutionary biology, biomedicine, AI, and exobiology.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 23, 2014
Dominique P. Lippelt, Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza S. Colzato
280 citations
Different types of meditation—focused attention, open monitoring, and loving-kindness or compassion—produce distinct effects on cognitive processes such as attentional selection, conflict monitoring, divergent thinking, and convergent thinking. These meditations are associated with different neural structures and patterns of brain activity, though exactly how they operate on these processes remains unclear. This review discusses recent findings and suggests how each meditation type may affect cognition, offering directions for future research.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 3, 2015
Xianglong Zeng, Cleo P. K. Chiu, Rong Wang et al.
256 citations
Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) effectively enhances positive emotions, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis of 24 empirical studies involving 1,759 participants. The analysis found medium effect sizes for LKM interventions on daily positive emotions in both wait-list controlled randomized trials and non-randomized studies, and small to large effect sizes for immediate positive emotions from ongoing practice. Interventions focused specifically on loving-kindness produced medium effects, while compassion-focused interventions yielded small effects. The length of interventions and meditation time did not influence outcomes, but studies without didactic components showed small effects. Individual differences and the nature of positive emotions also affected results. More research is needed to identify active intervention components and applicability in clinical populations.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2017
Rahil Rojiani, Juan F. Santoyo, Hadley Rahrig et al.
232 citations
Women who took a 12-week college meditation course showed greater decreases in negative affect and larger increases in mindfulness and self-compassion than men. Women's improvements in negative affect were linked to gains in both mindfulness skills and self-compassion, while men showed non-significant increases in negative affect and their affect changes correlated only with the ability to describe emotions, not with experiential or self-acceptance measures. The findings suggest that women may respond more favorably than men to school-based mindfulness training and that tailoring interventions by gender could improve effectiveness.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 15, 2018
Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, L. Williams et al.
228 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) share striking phenomenological similarities with the effects of the psychedelic drug DMT. In a placebo-controlled, within-subjects study, 13 healthy participants received DMT and placebo, then completed a standard NDE measure. DMT significantly increased NDE-like features compared to placebo. NDE scores were linked to DMT-induced ego-dissolution and mystical experiences, as well as baseline traits of absorption and delusional ideation. Nearly all NDE features overlapped between DMT-induced experiences and a matched group of actual NDE experiencers. These results indicate a remarkable similarity between the DMT state and NDEs, warranting further research.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 30, 2016
Marasha De Jong, Sara W. Lazar, Kiran Hug et al.
200 citations
Chronic pain and depression are linked to reduced body awareness. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) increased certain aspects of body awareness—specifically self-regulation and not distracting from bodily sensations—more than treatment as usual in 31 patients with chronic pain and active depression. The improvement in depression severity was partly explained by the increased ability to not distract from bodily sensations. These results offer preliminary support for the idea that mindfulness interventions can enhance body awareness in this population and highlight its clinical importance.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Francesca Siclari, Joshua J. LaRocque, Bradley R. Postle et al.
184 citations
Consciousness during sleep changes dramatically across the night. Seven healthy participants were awakened 15–30 minutes apart across 44 nights and asked about their most recent conscious experience before the alarm. Recall with content occurred in 34% of non-REM awakenings and 77% of REM awakenings. Each sleep stage showed a distinct profile of features including thinking, perceiving, self-relatedness, and reflective consciousness. The serial awakening method yielded a large, representative sample of sleep consciousness with minimal disruption from sleep fragmentation, and may be especially useful when combined with brain imaging techniques.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Jonathan Nash, Andrew B. Newberg
182 citations
Scholarly discourse on meditation suffers from inconsistent terminology and a lack of agreed-upon definitions and categories. Past attempts to create new lexicons have been useful but remain debated and misinterpreted. This paper proposes two new models to improve scientific reliability. First, it suggests a taxonomic system based on the established third-person paradigm of Affect and Cognition, borrowed from psychology and cognitive science, rather than inventing new first-person terminology. Second, it offers a definitional model that distinguishes meditation method from meditative state, conceptualizing meditation as a dynamic process with six related stages. The goal is to provide researchers with a reliable nomenclature for categorizing meditation methods and a conceptual framework to guide research and theory.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 4, 2019
Raíssa Nóbrega de Almeida, Ana Cecília de Menezes Galvão, Flávia Santos Da Silva et al.
173 citations
A single dose of ayahuasca increased serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels in both healthy controls and patients with treatment-resistant depression 48 hours after ingestion, compared with placebo. Baseline BDNF levels did not predict major depression or clinical characteristics, but lower BDNF was linked to hypocortisolemia. Among patients, only those who received ayahuasca showed a negative correlation between BDNF levels and depressive symptoms at 48 hours. The findings suggest a potential link between ayahuasca's antidepressant effects and changes in BDNF, supporting further investigation into psychedelics for depression.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 22, 2014
Aviva Eberkovich-Ohana, Yair Edor-Ziderman, Joseph Eglicksohn et al.
170 citations
Long-term mindfulness practitioners can volitionally enter states of 'Timelessness' and 'Spacelessness' that are distinct from ordinary memory or imagination. Brain activity recorded with MEG in 12 meditators showed that these altered states share a neural network involving the posterior cingulate, right temporoparietal junction, and cerebellum—regions linked to bodily processing—rather than the autobiographical memory and imagery networks activated during control states of recalling the past or imagining another place. Theta-band oscillations were prominent. Phenomenologically guided analyses further distinguished different levels of bodily alteration, demonstrating that contemplative expertise can help isolate the neural correlates of specific dimensions of conscious experience.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Thomas Metzinger
165 citations
Most conscious thought is actually automatic, non-agentive subpersonal processing, with personal-level cognition being the exception. Mind wandering can be understood as a loss of mental autonomy (M-autonomy), which people lack for roughly two thirds of their conscious lives. Empirical evidence from mind wandering and dreaming research shows that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly automatic and lacks mental agency, explicit goal-directedness, or veto control. This raises a new mind-body problem about how subpersonal cognition relates to personal-level thought. The paper proposes two criteria for individuating mind-wandering episodes: the 'self-representational blink' (SRB) and a shift in the phenomenological 'unit of identification' (UI), and outlines research goals linking mind wandering to philosophy of mind.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 10, 2022
Mauro Cavarra, Alessandra Falzone, Johannes G. Ramaekers et al.
156 citations
Modern clinical research on psychedelics shows promising outcomes for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy with appropriately screened participants in controlled settings, though some patients relapse or respond poorly. Individual and contextual factors (set and setting) appear to shape the psychedelic experience and clinical outcomes, suggesting the therapeutic context may moderate efficacy. This review searched PubMed/Medline and Scopus for clinical studies describing structured psychotherapeutic interventions alongside psychedelics. Ad-hoc and adapted therapeutic methods were identified. Common principles, points of divergence, and future directions are discussed, focusing on therapeutic stance, degree of directiveness, and potential suggestive effects of information provided to patients.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 4, 2022
Geoff J. Bathje, Eric Majeski, Mesphina Kudowor
154 citations
Psychedelic integration, the process of making sense of and applying insights from psychedelic experiences, has recently gained attention but remains poorly defined. Therapists, coaches, and individuals offer or engage in integration services, yet the term covers many practices and techniques, causing confusion. This review and concept analysis examines existing definitions, practices, and models of integration, providing a synthesized definition and model along with a comprehensive summary of practices to bring clarity to the subject.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 27, 2018
Lorena Lobo, M. Heras-Escribano, David Travieso
148 citations
Ecological psychology, developed by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson, offers an alternative to cognitivism and behaviorism by emphasizing the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as the unit of analysis, and affordances as the objects of perception. The approach rejects the poverty of the stimulus and the passive perceiver, instead highlighting perceptual learning and development. This paper analyzes the philosophical and psychological influences—pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology—and summarizes the main concepts and their historical development. The authors conclude that ecological psychology remains highly innovative, influencing contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences through the concept of affordance.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 26, 2016
Sarah Gouda, Minh T. Luong, Stefan Schmidt et al.
142 citations
A pilot study tested a school-embedded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program for both students and teachers. Students who took the course showed significant improvements in self-reported stress, self-regulation, school-specific self-efficacy, and interpersonal problems compared to a waitlist control group, with effect sizes ranging from 0.62 to 0.68. Medium effect sizes on mindfulness, anxiety, and creativity suggest potential in those areas. Teachers in the intervention group reported significantly higher mindfulness and fewer interpersonal problems (effect sizes 0.66 and 0.42), with medium effects on anxiety and emotion regulation. The findings highlight similarities and differences in MBSR effects on students and teachers and the importance of interpersonal outcomes.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Sami Abuhamdeh
140 citations
Flow, a concept introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, has been studied extensively for over forty years, yet understanding has advanced little beyond his original insights. This conceptual analysis argues that progress is hindered by inconsistent ways researchers define and measure flow. Among 42 recent studies, 24 distinct operationalizations were found. Three key inconsistencies are identified: treating flow as continuous versus discrete, as inherently enjoyable or not, and as dependent on or separate from the conditions that elicit it. The author recommends defining flow exclusively as a discrete, highly enjoyable optimal state, distinct from its antecedents, and suggests that lesser engagement be called task involvement instead.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2016
Andrea Jelić, Gaetano Tieri, Federico De Matteis et al.
138 citations
Neuroscientific approaches to architecture have yet to produce a systematic framework for interpreting results and guiding experiments. The enactive perspective is proposed as a guiding approach because it accounts for the active, dynamic connectedness between organism and world, shaped by bodily features. Emphasis is placed on embodiment and motivational factors as constituents of body-architecture interactions. Enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of spaces highlights two-way bodily communication, explorable in immersive virtual reality. Enactivism also aligns with phenomenological thinking in architectural theory, offering common ground between neuroscience and architecture. A model of the human as embodied, enactive, and situated agent is proposed as a basis for neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2014
Thilo Hinterberger, Stephanie Schmidt, Tsutomu Kamei et al.
130 citations
A conscious state of thoughtless emptiness reached by experienced meditators is characterized by reduced high-frequency brain processing alongside reduced low-frequency brain waves, distinguishing it from focused attention, open monitoring, resting, and sleep states. EEG recordings from 50 participants, focusing on 30 highly experienced meditators, showed significant decreases in gamma, alpha, beta, delta, and theta activity during thoughtless emptiness compared to other states. Less experienced participants did not show these differences. This suggests that meditative conscious awareness with decreased mental processing has distinct physiological properties from both higher cognitive states and drowsiness.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 17, 2016
D. Dorjee
124 citations
The term 'contemplative' is used frequently in meditation research, but there is no consensus on its definition. This paper proposes an alternative approach: contemplative science as the interdisciplinary study of the metacognitive self-regulatory capacity (MSRC) of the mind and associated modes of existential awareness (MEA), modulated by motivational, intentional, and contextual factors. The MSRC enables introspective awareness and self-regulation for well-being. Changes in conceptual processing are hypothesized to mediate between MSRC, motivational factors, and shifts in MEA. This framework aims to reduce terminological confusion, include varied contemplative practices, and encourage development of a comprehensive theory that recognizes first- and second-person methods.