Reports of near-death experiences (NDEs), end-of-life visions (ELVs), and culturally embedded afterlife narratives frequently describe profoundly positive or distressing states. Traditional interpretations treat these phenomena as evidence of external metaphysical realms. The Dying-Moment Dream Hypothesis proposes an alternative, neurobiologically grounded explanation: that culturally...
What consciousness is, and how it relates to the body and nature at large, are among the most enduring questions in human history. Notable thinkers have long grappled with its definition, mechanisms, and purpose. In this review, we examine both historical and contemporary perspectives on consciousness across philosophy, science, medicine, and practice. By integrating diverse perspectives and...
Depression is a highly prevalent mental disorder worldwide, and its cognitive rigidity-characterized by persistent negative beliefs resistant to countervailing evidence-remains a critical puzzle in philosophical psychiatry and clinical psychology. Existing theories of abductive reasoning have struggled to explain why similar adversities lead to rigid negative cognition in some individuals but...
Many theories of consciousness propose that consciousness arises from neural computation in the brain. All information in a neural computer is physically encoded, but consciousness contains un-encoded information about local space. The information required for decoding does not reside in the brain. So consciousness cannot arise from encoded neural information; but it could arise from un-encoded...
Creativity in human societies may be sustained not by isolated minds but by embodied, collective intelligence. Using music as a tractable model system, this paper reviews evidence that creativity depends on the dynamic tuning of uncertainty: moderate, time-varying surprise-often accompanied by interoceptive bodily sensations-can promote exploration, while interpersonal synchrony and social...
The Kolb Learning Cycle is a popular model of experiential learning in which agents move through four phases: experimentation, concretization, observation, and conceptualization. This model is a dynamic learning model that aligns well with embodied approaches to cognition, as it centers on student agency, inquiry, and exploration. However, there is currently no 4E (embodied, enactive, embedded,...
Intentional binding has been proposed as an implicit measure of shared sense of agency in joint action, yet it remains unclear whether it distinguishes between individual and different forms of joint control. We compared intentional binding across individual action, human-computer joint control, and human-human joint control in a physically coupled button-pressing task using haptic feedback...
Research on animal self-awareness has long been organized around the mirror test and related self-recognition paradigms, encouraging a binary framing of whether a given species does or does not possess self-awareness. However, accumulating evidence suggests that animal self-representation cannot be reduced to a single experimental criterion, sensory modality, or linear evolutionary scale. This...
This article aims to explain how emotions arise and operate within the framework of my attention-based theory of consciousness, referred to here as the AME theory of consciousness (Attentional Modulation of Energy). According to the AME theory of consciousness, the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is produced by the modulation of the energy level of the area of the organ of attention (aOA)...
Classical accounts of well-being have largely been grounded in homeostasis, conceptualizing well-being as the regulation of affective states around defended set points. More recent Bayesian and active inference approaches similarly characterize living systems as predictive regulators that maintain viable states by minimizing expected surprise. Building on these perspectives, this article...
Cognitive fusion, a key construct in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), describes the overidentification with internal thoughts that compromises psychological flexibility and contributes to maladaptive emotion regulation. Cognitive defusion techniques aim to reduce this entanglement, promoting adaptive functioning and improved mental health. This study examined the psychometric properties...
Aesthetic experiences are bodily-anchored, posited to evoke profound emotional responses and advance development, mental health and well-being. This paper reviews and conceptually analyzes the embodied aesthetic experience and its imperative contribution to the psychotherapeutic relational field, by integratively and interdisciplinarity interweaving neuroscientific and psychodynamic approaches...
The increasing number of diagnoses of anxiety disorders has highlighted the need for discussions about anxiety in its affective, psychopathological, and mundane dimensions. This scoping review mapped 36 scientific articles (2014-2025) to analyze how Phenomenology contributes to the understanding of anxiety as a global phenomenon. The results highlight trends in the field in 4 discursive...
Music performance anxiety (MPA) can substantially impair musicians' learning, performance, and psychological functioning. Although mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions (MABIs) have shown promise for MPA, their pooled effects, boundary conditions, and mechanism-related commonalities remain insufficiently understood. Grounded in a dual-path explanatory framework emphasizing decentering...
Meditation facilitates brain-body integration by synchronizing neural oscillations with autonomic rhythms. Nonetheless, the effects of heartfulness (heart-centered) and bell (sound-based) meditation on electroencephalography (EEG) and autonomic markers remain insufficiently explored. In this randomized, exploratory pilot study, nine healthy male university students were allocated to the...
Non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness that promote mental health and wellbeing are a growing focus of clinical and basic research. Previous work has revealed the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation. The current study investigated how a guided loving kindness meditation (LKM) combined with...
The recognition of collective optimal experience remains structurally unresolved in psychology. Existing frameworks-from group flow to collective effervescence-have extended optimal experience to the collective level, yet they have generally treated individual reports as the primary endpoint for determining whether such experience has occurred, leaving unresolved how collective recognition...
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program on sleep quality and academic stress among Chinese school adolescents. A total of 46 students were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n=22), which participated in the 8-week MBSR program, or the control group (n=24), which received no intervention. Assessments...
This article presents a framework for identifying the neural correlates of a low-level component of visual consciousness, base experience, defined as the spatial arrangement of colors experienced across the visual field. We propose a content-matching method that compares the content of base experience with that represented by candidate neural systems, treating content matches and mismatches as...
Synaesthesia is commonly defined as an involuntary and consistent phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive domain elicits an additional experience in another domain. Yet definitions derived from perceptual psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, and artistic practice often speak past one another. This article proposes a boundary-preserving conceptual...
Music is widely recognized as a powerful elicitor of embodied emotion, yet the precise mechanisms by which auditory patterns are translated into specific bodily feelings remain underspecified. Existing models of contagion and entrainment often lack granular mappings between musical features and distinct interoceptive states. This article proposes a novel theoretical framework viewing musical...
The replication crisis in psychology is now widely recognized as a crisis of measurement itself, not merely of questionable research practices. Recent critical work has revealed that many psychological scales may be measuring semantic associations rather than the psychological phenomena they purport to assess. This Hypothesis and Theory article makes three contributions. First, it synthesizes...
Mindfulness meditation (MM) is a promising cognitive strategy that may facilitate motor learning by improving attention and reducing anxiety. Our study aimed to investigate the effects of guided MM on motor learning in healthy young adults. The study was conducted as randomised controlled trials where 24 meditation-naive participants underwent either a 10-min MM session or seated rest (CT)...
Contemporary developmental psychology, positive psychology, prevention science, and contemplative research have substantially advanced understanding of human growth, resilience, flourishing, and the factors associated with psychological and behavioural outcomes across the lifespan. However, comparatively less theoretical attention has been devoted to whether the developmental processes that...