Frontiers in PsychologyJuly 22, 2026Nina Zech, Martin H. J. Busch, Veronika K. Jaeger et al.
Introduction Mind-body interventions (MBIs) increasingly used in health care include alterations in the ordinary state of consciousness that might be essential for their effects on psychological and physical patterns encoded in the unconscious. Little is known about the effects of repeated practice or the time of the repetitions. Methods EEG-derived Bispectral-Index (BIS) is clinically used to...
Preliminary evidence suggests that the combination of magnesium and ibogaine, an atypical psychedelic, may be a promising treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), opioid use disorder, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The "mystical" experience elicited by ibogaine, which is characterized by feelings of awe, selflessness, and transcendence, is correlated with improvements in PTSD...
Phenomenological control is the stable trait ability to alter subjective experience according to one’s goals. Although voluntary, experiences arising from phenomenological control are experienced as involuntary and may be incorrectly attributed to external causes. Such experiences may influence related beliefs about the world. In a large sample preregistered study (n = 497), we tested...
The nature of the soul has long divided philosophy, with Platonic dualism affirming an immaterial, enduring soul and modern physicalism reducing consciousness to brain activity. This paper proposes a functional framework based on the teachings of Dharma Master Jun Hong Lu in the Guan Yin Citta Dharma Door. It presents the soul as an invisible “governor” that directs thought, behavior, moral...
Deliberate human change rarely occurs because a person receives isolated information. Change takes hold when structured differences acquire stable influence over attention, emotion, body, expectation, behavior, symbol, environment, and social reinforcement. This paper develops a functional framework for explaining how such organization emerges, becomes dominant, destabilizes prior patterns, and...
Cannabis is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances, with higher use rates in countries that have implemented policies to legalize medical or recreational use. Following the development of cannabis products with concentrations well above 10% THC (high potency, delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol), the number of psychosis cases has also increased. Cannabis-attributable psychosis cases...
The U.S. departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Veterans Affairs (VA) have entered into a five‐year agreement to coordinate research, clinical development and future implementation of rapid‐acting psychiatric treatments, including psychedelic‐based therapies, for veterans with serious mental health conditions, an HHS news release stated. Under the agreement, the agencies will expand...
Abstract Recent work proposes that functional degradation in disorders of consciousness follows a systematic pattern across three organisational levels — biological regulation, integrated experiential awareness, and recursive self-modelling — with ordered vulnerability from the highest to the lowest. Is this three-level architecture a fundamental organisational principle, or a contingent...
Neural tissue contains no single executive that inspects every available action, yet an organism can maintain alternatives, commit to one action, monitor its consequences, and alter later behavior. This paper proposes a multiscale model in which learned synaptic and dendritic states make cellular transitions criterion-sensitive; excitation, inhibition, and disinhibition change time-varying...
SUMMARY How psychedelics act on cortical dendrites to produce long-lasting structural plasticity remains poorly understood. Here, we characterize the effects of psilocybin on dendritic calcium dynamics in pyramidal tract neurons of the mouse medial frontal cortex. Psilocybin transiently increases calcium event rates in apical dendritic tufts over a time course that parallels the drug’s...