The fields of neurophenomenology, psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology (PNEI) and epigenetics provide innovative and complementary perspectives on understanding the positive effects of art and aesthetic experiences on human well-being and health. Neurophenomenology integrates subjective experiential reports with neuroscientific data, offering valuable insights into how aesthetic experiences elicit...
This study explores the evolutionary emergence of semantic closure-the self-referential mechanism through which symbols actively construct and interpret their own functional contexts-by integrating concepts from relational biology, physical biosemiotics and ecological psychology into a unified computational enactivism framework. By extending Hofmeyr's (Fabrication, Assembly) systems-a...
A marker of engaging in compassion meditation and related processes is an increase in heart-rate variability (HRV), typically interpreted as a marker of parasympathetic nervous system response. While insightful, open questions remain. For example, which timescale is best to examine the effects of meditation and related practices on HRV? Furthermore, how might advanced time-series analyses--such...
Loss of cortical integration and changes in the dynamics of electrophysiological brain signals characterize the transition from wakefulness towards unconsciousness. In this study, we arrive at a basic model explaining these observations based on the theory of phase transitions in complex systems. We studied the link between spatial and temporal correlations of large-scale brain activity...
Networks, as efficient representations of complex systems, have appealed to scientists for a long time and now permeate many areas of science, including neuroimaging (Bullmore and Sporns 2009 Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 10 , 186–198. ( doi:10.1038/nrn2618 )). Traditionally, the structure of complex networks has been studied through their statistical properties and metrics concerned with node and link...