While the field of empirical study on religion and spirituality in relation to mental health has rapidly expanded over the past decade, little is known about underlying dimensions of spirituality cross-culturally conceived. We aimed to bridge this gap by inductively deriving potential universal dimensions of spirituality through a large-scale, multi-national data collection, and examining the...
This study explored the effects of a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention on reading, attention, and psychological well-being among people with developmental dyslexia and/or attention deficits. Various types of dyslexia exist, characterized by different error types. We examined a question that has not been tested so far: which types of errors (and dyslexias) are affected by...
Lucid dreaming (LD) is a state of consciousness in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming and can possibly control the content of his or her dream. To investigate the LD prevalence among different samples, researchers have used different types of methodologies. With regard to retrospective self-report questionnaire, two ways of proceeding seem to emerge. In one case, a definition...
The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. (2014) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment-a complexity...
Following training, motor memory consolidation is thought to involve either memory stabilization or off-line learning processes. The extent to which memory stabilization or off-line learning relies on post-training wakeful periods or sleep is not clear and thus, novel research approaches are needed to further explore the conditions that promote motor memory consolidation. The present experiment...
Sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences. In this article I summarize what we currently know about sense of agency; looking at how it is measured and what theories there are to explain it. I then explore some of the potential applications of this research, something that the sense of agency research field has been slow to identify and implement. This...
Integrated information (Φ) is a measure of the cause-effect power of a physical system. This paper investigates the relationship between Φ as defined in Integrated Information Theory and state differentiation ([Formula: see text]), the number of, and difference between potential system states. Here we provide theoretical justification of the relationship between Φ and [Formula: see text], then...
Background: There are few studies devoted to assessing the impact of meditation-intensive retreats on the well-being, positive psychology, and personality of experienced meditators. We aimed to assess whether a 1-month Vipassana retreat: (a) would increase mindfulness and well-being; (b) would increase prosocial personality traits; and (c) whether psychological changes would be mediated and/or...
A main goal of the neuroscience of consciousness is: find the neural correlate to conscious experiences (NCC). When have we achieved this goal? The answer depends on our operationalization of "NCC." Chalmers (2000) shaped the widely accepted operationalization according to which an NCC is a neural system with a state which is minimally sufficient (but not necessary) for an experience. A deeper...
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical - and even psychological - reckoning with imagery and its parent concept 'imagination'. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination's...
Anomalous or exceptional experiences are uncommon experiences which are usually interpreted as being paranormal by those who report them. These experiences have long remained difficult to explain, but current progress in cognitive neuroscience and psychoanalysis sheds light on the contexts in which they emerge, as well as on their underlying processes. Following a brief description of the...
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which additional perceptual experiences are elicited by sensory stimuli or cognitive concepts. Synesthetes possess a unique type of phenomenal experiences not directly triggered by sensory stimulation. Therefore, for better understanding of consciousness it is relevant to identify the mental and physiological processes that subserve synesthetic experience. In the...
In the past decades, sense of control-the feeling that one is in control of one's actions has gained much scientific interests. Various scales have been used to measure sense of control in previous studies, yet no study has allowed participants to create a scale for rating their control experiences despite advances in the neighboring field of conscious vision has been linked to this approach....
The embodied-grounded view of cognition and language holds that sensorimotor experiences in the form of 're-enactments' or 'simulations' are significant to the individual's development of concepts and competent language use. However, a typical objection to the explanatory force of this view is that, in everyday life, we engage in linguistic exchanges about much more than might be directly...
While it has been suggested that loving-kindness meditation (LKM) is an effective practice for promoting positive emotions, the empirical evidence in the literature remains unclear. Here, we provide a systematic review of 24 empirical studies (N = 1759) on LKM with self-reported positive emotions. The effect of LKM on positive emotions was estimated with meta-analysis, and the influence of...
The reciprocal coupling of perception and action in cognitive agents has been firmly established: perceptions guide action but so too do actions influence what is perceived. While much has been said on the implications of this for the agent's external behavior, less attention has been paid to what it means for the internal bodily mechanisms which underpin cognitive behavior. In this article, we...
What is the role of top-down attentional modulation in consciously accessing working memory (WM) content? In influential WM models, information can exist in different states, determined by allocation of attention; placing the original memory representation in the center of focused attention gives rise to conscious access. Here we discuss various lines of evidence indicating that such...
Search activity (SA) is the behavioral and mental activity that is oriented to changes of the environment or of the subject's view and approach to the environment according to personal needs without the definite probability forecast of the outcomes of such activity, but with a regular consideration of the outcomes in the process of active behavior. Dream's lucidity (the subject's realization...
This paper presents an analysis of dream-reality confusion (DRC) in relation to the characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD), based on research findings and theoretical considerations. It is hypothesized that people with BPD are more likely to experience DRC compared to people in non-clinical population. Several variables related to this hypothesis were identified through a...
This article reviews recent findings indicating some common brain processes during dissociative states and dreaming with the aim to outline a perspective that neural chaotic states during dreaming can be closely related to dissociative states that may manifest in dreams scenery. These data are in agreement with various clinical findings that dissociated states can be projected into the "dream...
The concept of embodied cognition attracts enormous interest but neither is the concept particularly well-defined nor is the related research guided by systematic theorizing. To improve this situation the theory of event coding (TEC) is suggested as a suitable theoretical framework for theorizing about cognitive embodiment-which, however, presupposes giving up the anti-cognitivistic attitude...