In 2005, Richard Conn Henry from Johns Hopkins University published “The Mental Universe” in Nature, advancing the idealistic claim that the universe is fundamentally mental and conscious, and that matter has no objective reality. Grounded in a one-sided interpretation of the observational effects in quantum mechanics, this view has sparked long-standing debates across physics, philosophy,...
The clinical importance of iboga alkaloids lies in their efficacy in reversing drug addiction and modulating drug tolerance. However, due to safety concerns, their use is restricted to appropriate medical supervision. These alkaloids often cause severe psychedelic effects due to differential binding to various brain receptors and cardiotoxicity by blocking the human ether-a-go-go-related gene...
Within the predictive processing framework, most theories of consciousness address either the architecture of conscious access, the representational structure, the information-theoretic measure, or the computational principle. What remains underexplored is the temporal dynamic of consciousness: why it emerges under novelty, recedes under familiarity, and re-emerges under disruption. This paper...
Abstract Psilocybin and other serotonergic drugs acutely alter human brain function and large-scale connectivity as measured with BOLD fMRI, but whether these effects are frequency-specific remains unknown. We applied multitaper spectral and cross-spectral analyses to resting-state fMRI data from 28 healthy volunteers scanned multiple times acutely following oral psilocybin administration (0.2...
For the past half-century, psychiatric drug development has largely focused on tweaking neurotransmitter receptors and chemical pathways. Yet despite billions of dollars invested and major advances in neuroscience, truly innovative treatments for mental illness remain scarce. Disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) continue to be managed with drugs...
Nāgārjuna (2nd–3rd centuries) and Āryadeva (3rd century) had somewhat different approaches to the interpretation of anātmavāda (the conception of the non-existence of unchanging “I”) in Buddhism. For Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, the concept of ātman is contradictory and therefore empty, since it is based not on a non-conceptual reality, but on other concepts and ideas. But...
ABSTRACT Schizophrenia (SCZ) is increasingly linked to neuroimmune dysregulation and impaired synaptic plasticity, yet the cellular mechanisms connecting inflammatory signaling to neural dysfunction remain poorly understood. Using human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cortical spheroids (hCS) and astrocytes from patients with SCZ and matched controls, we investigated the effects of...
Background: Conventional psychological and pharmacological substance abuse treatments are limited to moderate effect sizes and fail to magnify outcomes when combined. Analog psychedelic agents N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) show therapeutic potential for treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders including substance addictions. Methods: This...
This paper develops a phenomenology-first approach to artificial consciousness by reframing consciousness as the subjective experience enacted through an agent’s interface with the world. We shift the methodological focus to first-person structures, modeled mathematically by categories derived from Q-networks to capture actions and phenomenological invariants. In this framework, Q-networks are...
Background: Holding a relevant ritualistic and ethnomedicinal value among the Mesoamerican tribes, Tagetes lucida Cav. has recently seen its uses being translated into Western communities, primarily for recreational ends, given its psychoactivity. Despite the new popularity resurgence of entheogens, the available data concerning this plant’s pharmacological and safety profile remain scarce...