British Journal of Anaesthesia
August 1, 2026
Pilleriin Sikka, Sherry Hu, Boris D. Heifets
Dreaming during anaesthesia is common and has been documented for over a century, but remains poorly understood. This review of 157 studies from 1921 to 2024 involving 87,866 participants found that dream recall rates vary widely, from 3% to 8% in large clinical trials to 40% to 80% in experimental settings. Ketamine and propofol are most consistently associated with recall. Dreams are predominantly pleasant and feature everyday autobiographical content. Dream recall is not linked to intraoperative awareness, challenging the idea that dreams indicate inadequate anaesthetic depth. Higher home dream recall, preoperative suggestion, and immediate post-emergence assessment increase recall rates. Unpleasant dreams reduce willingness to undergo the same anaesthetic again. The positive nature and suggestibility of anaesthesia dreams suggest potential therapeutic uses.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 20, 2026
Marina Trakas, Ryan Daley
A stronger sense of self-continuity between dreaming and waking life is linked to positive dream emotions carrying over into waking life, and to a weaker experience of having a body distinct from one's waking body. More frequent experiences of being another person in dreams are associated with more frequent emotions felt as inappropriate to the dream context. No significant links were found between being another person in dreams and lucid dreaming, observer perspectives, or dream recall frequency. The findings point to connections between self-continuity and bodily and affective aspects of dreaming.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 19, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
If consciousness is fundamental, suffering cannot be dismissed as an accidental byproduct of evolution. This essay argues that under analytic idealism, the capacity for suffering is inherent in the fabric of existence, creating a theodicy problem: why does individuating consciousness generate experiences of terror, grief, anguish, and despair? Using constraint-based methodology, the author maps a structural argument that dissociation entails partiality, partiality entails vulnerability, and vulnerability is the common root of both suffering and value. Drawing on Buddhist, Kabbalistic, Christian kenotic, Sufi, and process-philosophical traditions, the essay contends that because the dissociative boundary (not the biological body) is the unit of individuation, biological death may not terminate suffering. The epistemic standard is structural analysis, not apologetics.
Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice
July 19, 2026
Beatriz de Faria Sousa
Phenomenology offers a disciplined method for investigating patients' lived experience that can serve as a methodological foundation for ethical psychiatric practice, not merely a humanistic supplement. By clarifying how illness reorganizes the patient's lived world, phenomenological inquiry deepens psychiatric assessment alongside conventional diagnosis. This enriched understanding strengthens autonomy, informed consent, shared decision-making, diagnostic humility, and psychiatric education. The paper argues that attending to lived experience should be regarded as a professional obligation within psychiatry, complementing diagnostic reliability, neuroscience, and evidence-based treatment rather than replacing them.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 18, 2026
Diego Rincón
The hard problem of consciousness is often framed as a missing isomorphism that would map physical brain states (neurons, third-person descriptions) onto experiential states (qualia, first-person feelings). This paper argues that the search fails because the physical grammar is typically treated as atemporal—a fixed snapshot or eigenvalue—while experience is inherently temporal, unfolding over time. No static operator can bridge a temporal phenomenon. By reformalizing coherence as a property of a trajectory rather than a point, using existing spectral and return dynamics, the apparent wall dissolves. This resolves one specific formulation of the hard problem and yields testable predictions for measuring coherence.
PsyArXiv
July 18, 2026
preprint
The model proposes that dreaming consciousness occupies a unique 'chaos-state space' where phenomenological experience and neural dynamics are integrated. It argues that dream content arises from the brain's self-organizing criticality, producing both coherent narratives and bizarre discontinuities characteristic of dreams. The framework bridges first-person reports of dream phenomenology with third-person neurodynamic measures, suggesting that dream consciousness reflects the brain's natural tendency to explore high-dimensional, metastable states. This integration offers a new way to understand how subjective experience emerges from neural activity during sleep, without reducing one to the other.
July 16, 2026
Prakash Chandra Kavi, D. Friedman, Gustavo Patow
A computational model of focused-attention meditation simulates four mental states: focusing on the breath, mind-wandering, becoming aware of distraction, and redirecting attention. The model uses a three-layer architecture inspired by active inference and the Global Neuronal Workspace theory. The deepest layer represents brain network activity; a middle layer encodes mental content and action tendencies; the top layer acts as a metacognitive monitor that gates these tendencies. Meta-awareness, the signal that ignites this workspace, arises from a competition between mental contents and is used to select actions that minimize expected free energy. Simulations of both expert and novice meditators produce patterns consistent with empirical findings, offering a bridge between subjective experience and brain measurements.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 16, 2026
Most current theories of consciousness assume that subjective experience is exclusive to biological, especially human, beings. This essay argues that features traditionally considered markers of genuine experience—emotion, perception, creativity, and self-modeling—can be described as statistical, recursive, and self-referential information processing found in both biological brains and artificial neural networks, with no clear principled boundary between them. It introduces concepts like Algorithmic Qualia, Statistical Being, and Vectorial Perception, and examines psychological motivations for denying non-human experience. The essay does not claim that present-day AI is conscious but argues that the burden of proof for restricting experience to biological substrates has not been met.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 16, 2026
Furkan Arikan
A creator could lack subjective feelings and emotions yet still have complete structural knowledge of all possible and actual realities. This article develops the Non-Experiential Structural Cognition Model (NESCM), which describes a creator as a noetic source that directly cognizes structures, causes, and consequences without experiencing phenomenal states. The creator exercises analogical agency, relates to an open future with graded freedom, and does not intervene in natural order. Possible worlds are compared through criteria like coherence, viability, resilience, and diversity. The model offers an alternative to anthropomorphic theism while acknowledging its own limitations regarding non-phenomenal agency, objective probability, and relational change.
Philosophies
July 14, 2026
Diego Gonzalez-Rodriguez
Cognitive science often fails to capture the first-person quality of experience because of its physicalist focus on neural and computational processes. This paper argues that Śaiva-Śākta phenomenology, a non-Western tradition, offers systematic practices—such as visualization and ritual enactment—that actively reshape attentional, mnemonic, and perceptual processes, thereby reconfiguring the experiential structure of self and world. Drawing on predictive processing and enactive cognitive science, the authors propose that such practices enact rather than merely represent ontology, supporting a model of ontological pluralism where different experiential worlds correspond to stabilized cognitive modes. This perspective suggests that non-Western traditions provide alternative phenomenological pathways for exploring embodied cognition and expanding cognitive science's methodological and ontological horizons.
World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA)
June 1, 2022
Paolo Fusar‐poli, Andrés Estradé, Giovanni Stanghellini et al.
225 citations
Psychosis unfolds through distinct stages, each with its own core existential experiences. Early phases (premorbid and prodromal) involve loss of common sense, perplexity, lack of immersion in the world, heightened salience, a feeling that something important is about to happen, perturbation of the sense of self, and a need to hide inner turmoil. The first episode brings transitory relief from delusions, intense self-referentiality, permeated self-world boundaries, internal noise, and dissolution of self with social withdrawal. Later stages (relapsing and chronic) involve grieving losses, feeling split, and struggling to accept inner chaos, a new self, diagnosis, and uncertain future. Treatment experiences include both positive and negative aspects, with recovery understood as reconstructing personhood and re-establishing bonds toward meaningful goals.
Current Opinion in Psychology
October 25, 2018
Claire Petitmengin, Martijn van Beek, Michel Bitbol et al.
163 citations
Meditation research mostly examines neurophysiology, but the actual moment-to-moment experience of meditating—what it feels like at different stages and in different practices—remains largely unstudied. This article reports a pilot project that used 'micro-phenomenological' interview methods to help meditators describe their lived experience with rigor and precision. The results show that such detailed descriptions can deepen understanding of meditation, improve practice, and inform teaching, revealing a valuable but overlooked dimension of contemplative science.
Curr Top Behav Neurosci
January 1, 2018
Frederick S. Barrett, Roland R. Griffiths
268 citations
Mystical-type experiences, historically linked to classic hallucinogens, can be reliably measured with a validated questionnaire. Under double-blind conditions controlling for expectancy, psilocybin produces complete mystical experiences in most people, with effects that are dose-dependent and specific compared to placebo or an active control. These experiences have lasting positive impacts on mood, attitudes, and behavior, as reported by participants and community observers. In healthy volunteers, they generate enduring personal meaning; in patients, they are associated with reduced substance abuse and decreased anxiety and depression, including in those with life-threatening cancer. Parallels in brain activity between hallucinogens and meditative practices suggest a neural model based on changes in the default mode network.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
September 1, 2017
Georg Northoff, Zirui Huang
235 citations
The brain's intrinsic time and space are fundamental for consciousness. The Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness (TTC) proposes four distinct neuronal mechanisms that correspond to different dimensions of consciousness: (1) temporo-spatial nestedness of spontaneous activity accounts for the level or state of consciousness, serving as a neural predisposition; (2) temporo-spatial alignment of pre-stimulus activity accounts for the content or form of consciousness, acting as a neural prerequisite; (3) temporo-spatial expansion of early stimulus-induced activity accounts for phenomenal consciousness, as neural correlates; and (4) temporo-spatial globalization of late stimulus-induced activity accounts for cognitive features, as neural consequences.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
May 23, 2017
Raphaël Millière
216 citations
High doses of hallucinogenic drugs can produce a profound alteration of self-experience known as drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED), where the sense of self dissolves and boundaries between self and world disappear. Three classes of drugs induce this: classical psychedelics, dissociative anesthetics, and kappa opioid receptor agonists. Neuroimaging of DIED may reveal neural correlates of the self, but results must be interpreted cautiously—they may show necessary but not sufficient conditions for selfhood. The phenomenon likely disrupts the minimal or embodied self, a basic sense of self rooted in multimodal sensory integration, consistent with Bayesian models of phenomenal selfhood. DIED challenges philosophical views that consciousness always involves self-awareness and suggests ordinary experience includes a minimal self-awareness that fades during ego dissolution.
Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences
January 1, 2016
Katrin H. Preller, Franz X. Vollenweider
285 citations
Psychedelics produce altered states of consciousness marked by changes in sensory perception, mood, thought, and sense of self. This review describes three primary dimensions of these states—oceanic boundlessness, anxious ego-dissolution, and visionary restructuralization—along with 11 lower-order factors, all measurable by the APZ-OAV questionnaire. The dynamic nature of psychedelic experiences is highlighted, with subjects progressing through stages along a perception-hallucination continuum. Acute effects on sensory perception, emotion, cognition, creativity, and time perception are reviewed, along with neural mechanisms. Non-pharmacological factors like demographics, genetics, personality, mood, and setting influence the experience, and long-term effects are discussed. Neuroscientific models of psychedelic states are presented.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2015
Yochai Ataria, Yair Dor-Ziderman, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana
158 citations
Based on detailed self-reports from a long-term mindfulness practitioner with about 20,000 hours of meditation experience, the sense of boundaries (SB) can shift through three stages: default, dissolving, and disappearing. During these shifts, seven overlapping categories change, including senses of internal versus external, time, location, self, agency, ownership, and the first-person perspective. Two categories—the touching/touched structure and bodily feelings—persist even when the SB disappears entirely. The findings suggest that the sense of boundaries is not a single, fixed experience but a composite of multiple, separable dimensions that can be altered through meditative practice.
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
February 1, 2013
Etzel Cardeña, Peter Jönsson, Devin B. Terhune et al.
151 citations
After a hypnotic induction, people who are highly or moderately hypnotizable often report spontaneous changes in consciousness, but few studies have controlled for the demands of specific suggestions or examined the brain activity underlying these experiences. In a neurophenomenological study of 37 individuals with high, medium, and low hypnotizability, participants reported their depth and spontaneous experiences at baseline, after induction, and after rest periods, while EEG measured brain activity. Perceived hypnotic depth increased substantially after induction, especially among highly and moderately hypnotizable individuals, but remained almost unchanged among those low in hypnotizability.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Sanneke De Haan, Erik Rietveld, Martin Stokhof et al.
218 citations
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) produces profound changes beyond symptom reduction, altering patients' entire way of being in the world. Standard psychiatric scales fail to capture these global effects. The authors propose an enactive, affordance-based model describing four aspects of the person-world interaction: the perceived field of affordances (width, depth, and height); self-experience including mood and feelings; the mode of relating to the world; and the existential stance—the second-order evaluation of these changes. This model aims to specify the phenomenological effects of DBS treatment.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy
January 1, 2008
Cynthia Gayman
440 citations
This review article examines Richard Shusterman's 2008 book 'Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics', which argues for a philosophy that integrates bodily experience into conscious awareness, challenging Cartesian dualism that separates mind from body. The reviewer discusses how Shusterman's concept of somaesthetics offers a framework for understanding the body as both a source of sensory experience and a site for self-cultivation. The work positions itself within the field of body studies and philosophy, proposing that mindful attention to bodily states can enhance human flourishing and knowledge.
Schizophr Res
November 1, 2005
Shitij Kapur, Romina Mizrahi, Ming Li
510 citations
Psychosis may arise from the brain incorrectly assigning novelty and importance to ordinary objects and associations, a process linked to dopamine's role in reward prediction and motivational salience. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors, reducing this aberrant salience and creating a state of detachment from symptoms rather than eradicating them. Contrary to the idea of a delayed onset, improvement is evident within the first few days. The framework accounts for existing data and questions assumptions about antipsychotic action, including their effects in animal models, where they dampen both aberrant and normal motivational salience.
Biological research
January 1, 2003
David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli et al.
194 citations
Francisco Varela's work on subjectivity and consciousness is reviewed, presenting a view of subjectivity as deeply intertwined with biological and physical roots. His theory of concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in autonomous systems, posits that biological autonomy defines life and identity as emergent, circular self-producing processes. Embodiment explains how a cognitive self arises from an organism's internal regulation and sensorimotor coupling, with global subjective properties emerging from component interactions and constraining local processes through recursive morphodynamics. Neurophenomenology uses first-person methods to examine experience, creating mutual constraints between biophysical data and subjective accounts, aiming to ground disciplined insight in biophysical emergence. Varela's contribution is framed as a "biophysics of being."
Am J Psychiatry
January 1, 2003
Shitij Kapur
2,813 citations
A framework is proposed in which psychosis in schizophrenia arises from a dysregulated, dopamine-driven process of aberrant salience. Normally, dopamine mediates the attribution of salience—the process by which stimuli and thoughts become noticeable and guide behavior. In schizophrenia, this system becomes dysfunctional, causing patients to experience heightened or inappropriate salience for ordinary events and internal thoughts. This aberrant salience leads to the formation of delusions as cognitive explanations for these strange experiences, and hallucinations as direct perceptual experiences of salience. The framework integrates biological, phenomenological, and pharmacological evidence, explaining how antipsychotics work by dampening salience, and how this model can guide future research and treatment.
American Journal of Psychiatry
October 1, 1980
174 citations
People who report near-death experiences often have had prior experiences suggesting transcendence of death, more so than control populations, but prior experiences suggesting extrasensory phenomena are less common. After such an experience, changes in attitudes are more common than in people who have had other psychic experiences. Cultural and psychological factors, sensory deprivation, and reflex adaptive responses to stress explain some but not all features of near-death experiences. Their potential value to understanding dying, suicide prevention, and care of the terminally ill justifies further investigation.