High stress and low wellbeing pose severe individual, societal and economic threats, and there is a pressing demand for non-invasive stress reduction tools. This exploratory pilot study assessed the efficacy of speech prosody as a biosignal for stress elicitation, when comparing relaxation outcomes of two interventions with a control group. Thirty participants were divided into three treatment...
Combat-related stress is associated with autonomic nervous system (ANS) dysregulation-sympathetic predominance, reduced vagal tone, and decreased heart rate variability (HRV)-linked to increased cardiovascular risk. Non-pharmacological interventions targeting autonomic regulation show promise, but controlled studies in combat-exposed populations remain limited. We assessed whether adding a...
The aim of this study is to discuss the adoption of the popular natural visibility graph method (NVGM) to create complex networks and explore the condition, ignored by early work on this subject, where the dynamical system under analysis is characterized by a deviation from the ordinary ergodic condition, as a consequence of turbulent events (crucial events) with an inverse power law index μ...
Identity—differentiating self from external reality—and agency—being the author of one’s acts—are generally considered intrinsic properties of awareness and looked at as mental constructs generated by consciousness. Here a different view is proposed. All physiological systems display complex time-dependent regulations to adapt or anticipate external changes. To interact with rapid changes, an...
The brain cannot stop elaborating information. While the circuitries implied in processing sensory information, and those involved in programming and producing movements, have been extensively studied and characterized, what circuits elicit and sustain the endogenous activity (which might be referred to as imaginative activity) has not been clarified to a similar extent. The two areas which...
In recent years, brain imaging studies have begun to shed light on the neural correlates of physiologically-reversible altered states of consciousness such as deep sleep, anesthesia, and psychedelic experiences. The emerging consensus is that normal waking consciousness requires the exploration of a dynamical repertoire enabling both global integration i.e., long-distance interactions between...