Qualitative-consciousness arises at the sensory level of olfactory processing and pervades our experience of smells to the extent that qualitative character is maintained whenever we are aware of undergoing an olfactory experience. Building upon the distinction between Access and Phenomenal Consciousness the paper offers a nuanced distinction between Awareness and Qualitative-consciousness that...
Recently within social cognition it has been argued that understanding others is primarily characterized by dynamic and second person interactive processes, rather than by taking a third person observational stance. Within this enactivist view of intersubjective understanding, researchers differ in their claims regarding the innateness of such processes. Here we proposed to distinguish nativist...
I review the data on human visual perception that reveal the critical role played by non-visual contextual factors influencing visual activity. The global perspective that progressively emerges reveals that vision is sensitive to multiple couplings with other systems whose nature and levels of abstraction in science are highly variable. Contrary to some views where vision is immersed in modular...
The hard problem of consciousness has been often claimed to be unsolvable by the methods of traditional empirical sciences. It has been argued that all the objects of empirical sciences can be fully analyzed in structural terms but that consciousness is (or has) something over and above its structure. However, modern neuroscience has introduced a theoretical framework in which also the...
This article examines the relation of contemplative exercises with enhancement of students' experience during neuroscience studies. Short contemplative exercises inspired by the Buddhist tradition of self-inquiry were introduced in an undergraduate neuroscience course for psychology students. At the start of the class, all students were asked to participate in short "personal brain...
Is there something special about the way music communicates feelings? Theorists since Meyer (1956) have attempted to explain how music could stimulate varied and subtle affective experiences by violating learned expectancies, or by mimicking other forms of social interaction. Our proposal is that music speaks to the brain in its own language; it need not imitate any other form of communication....
Our thesis in this paper is that, in order to appreciate the interplay between cognitive (goal-directed) and physical performance in tool use, it is necessary to determine the role that representations play in the use of tools. We argue that rather being solely a matter of internal (mental) representation, tool use makes use of the external representations that define the...
Research in psychopathology may be considered as an intersubjective endeavor mainly concerned with understanding other minds. Thus, the way we conceive of social understanding influences how we do research in psychology in the first place. In this paper, we focus on psychopathology research as a paradigmatic case for this methodological issue, since the relation between the researcher and the...
Quadrato Motor Training (QMT) is a specifically-structured walking meditation, aimed at improving reflectivity and lowering habitual thought and movement. Here we set out to examine the possible effect of QMT on reflectivity, employing the Hidden Figures Test (HFT), which assesses both spatial performance (measured by correct answers) as well as reflectivity (interpolated from correct answers...
Self-transcendence (ST) is one of specific human experiences often related to harmony with nature or feeling oneness with others or the self as an integral part of the whole universe. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) is a widely used personality measure, and ST is one of personality dimensions (Cloninger, 1994; Cloninger et al. , 1994). Previous studies showed that ST has...
In neurology and psychiatry the detailed study of illusory own body perceptions has suggested close links between bodily processing and self-consciousness. One such illusory own body perception is heautoscopy where patients have the sensation of being reduplicated and to exist at two or even more locations. In previous experiments, using a video head-mounted display, self-location and...
The first decade of the twenty-first century was characterized by renewed scientific interest in self-generated mental activity (activity largely generated by the individual, rather than in direct response to experimenters' instructions or specific external sensory inputs). To understand this renewal of interest, we interrogated the peer-reviewed literature from 2003 to 2012 (i) to explore...
The proposed model holds that, at its most fundamental level, visual awareness is quantized. That is to say that visual awareness arises as individual bits of awareness through the action of neural circuits with hundreds to thousands of neurons in at least the human striate cortex. Circuits with specific topologies will reproducibly result in visual awareness that correspond to basic aspects of...
From a philosophical point of view, the subject of Thomas Schramme's article seems to be well-known as he addresses one of the most prominent debates in both classical and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. Of course, Schramme does not attempt to broadly cover this general issue. He rather focuses on the neglect of philosophical approaches within the context of the search for a...
All mammals show the physiological correlates of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Many contemplative traditions propose a fourth state of consciousness, “silent consciousness,” defined as consciousness without reportable contents. For example, the Mandukya Upanishad, one of the root texts of Vedanta philosophy, explicitly claims a fourth state of “consciousness without content.” (Sharma, 1997)...
Vertebrates evolved in the Cambrian Period before 520 million years ago, but we do not know when or how consciousness arose in the history of the vertebrate brain. Here we propose multiple levels of isomorphic or somatotopic neural representations as an objective marker for sensory consciousness. All extant vertebrates have these, so we deduce that consciousness extends back to the group's...
Nearly 60 years ago, Jerome L. Singer launched a groundbreaking research program into daydreaming (Singer, 1955, 1975, 2009) that presaged and laid the foundation for virtually every major strand of mind wandering research active today (Antrobus, 1999; Klinger, 1999, 2009). Here we review Singer's enormous contribution to the field, which includes insights, methodologies, and tools still in use...
Even when we are ostensibly doing "nothing"-as during states of rest, sleep, and reverie-the brain continues to process information. In resting wakefulness, the mind generates thoughts, plans for the future, and imagines fictitious scenarios. In sleep, when the demands of sensory input are reduced, our experience turns to the thoughts and images we call "dreaming." Far from being a meaningless...
Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists study most phenomena of attention by measuring subjects' overt responses to discrete environmental stimuli that can be manipulated to test competing theories. The mind wandering experience, however, cannot be locally instigated by cleverly engineered stimuli. Investigators must therefore rely on correlational and observational methods to understand...
Dreams are thought to respond to self- and socially-relevant situations that evoke strong emotions and require rapid adaptation. First pregnancy is such a situation during which maternal mental representations (MMR) of the unborn baby, the self and significant others undergo remodeling. Some studies suggest that dreams during pregnancy contain more MMR and are more dysphoric, but such studies...
Humans enjoy a private, mental life that is richer and more vivid than that of any other animal. Yet as central as the conscious experience is to human life, numerous disciplines have long struggled to explain it. The present paper reviews the latest theories and evidence from psychology that addresses what conscious thought is and how it affects human behavior. We suggest that conscious...
Through dreaming, a different facet of the self is created as a result of a self-organizing process in the brain. Self-organization in biological systems often happens as an answer to an environmental change for which the existing system cannot cope; self-organization creates a system that can cope in the newly changed environment. In dreaming, self-organization serves the function of...
Subjectivity, intentionality, self-awareness and will are major components of consciousness in human beings. Changes in consciousness and its content following different brain processes and malfunction have long been studied. Cognitive sciences assume that brain activities have an infrastructure, but there is also evidence that consciousness itself may change this infrastructure. The two-way...
Over the centuries architectural theory evolved several notions of embodiment, proposing in the nineteenth and twentieth century that architectonic experience is related to physiological responses of the observer. Recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of embodiment (or bodily self-consciousness) enable empirical studies of architectonic embodiment. Here, we investigated how architecture...
An artificial neural network called reaCog is described which is based on a decentralized, reactive and embodied architecture developed to control non-trivial hexapod walking in an unpredictable environment (Walknet) while using insect-like navigation (Navinet). In reaCog, these basic networks are extended in such a way that the complete system, reaCog, adopts the capability of inventing new...