The relationship between sensory stimuli and perceptions is brain-state dependent: in wakefulness, suprathreshold stimuli evoke perceptions; under anesthesia, perceptions are abolished; and during dreaming and in dissociated states, percepts are internally generated. Here, we exploit this state dependence to identify brain activity associated with internally generated or stimulus-evoked...
SleepApril 20, 2024Urmil Shah, Kumar Abhishek, Rushikesh Shukla et al.
Sleep paralysis is a condition that has been on the rise in recent years, occurring during the pre or post sleep stages. While there is no known direct cause of sleep paralysis, studies have shown a number of potential causes, including poor quality of sleep, alcohol use, exposure to stressful events, anxiety disorders, and a family history of the illness. The purpose of this study was to...
Rythmia Life Advancement Center is the first and currently only medically licensed Ayahuasca center in the world. Rythmia is helping to bridge the gap between the Western medical model of health care with the indigenous healing modalities of Latin America. The “Rythmia Way” program uses a variety of modalities, in addition to Ayahuasca, to help individuals find meaning in their lives and...
Psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens) are psychoactive substances that can alter perception and mood, and affect cognitive functions. These substances activate 5-HT2A receptors and may exert therapeutic effects. Some of the disorders for which psychedelic-assisted therapy have been studied include depression, addiction, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite the increasing...
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has over the last decade emerged as a promising treatment strategy for mental health disease, and the therapeutic potential in classical psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD and 5-MeO-DMT is presently being pursued in a plethora of clinical trials. However, the resurgent interest in the drugs as therapeutics has also prompted a search for novel agents with...
We here analyse the question of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relation with consciousness as a reference model. This kind of analysis reveals several structural and functional features of the human brain that appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience and that current research on...
The impact of psychedelic treatment on patients suffering from psychiatric diseases like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic psychiatric disorder (PTSD), and existential distress related to cancer has become very intriguing to psychiatrists in the modern era. Serotonergic psychedelics include Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, and methylene-deoxy methamphetamine...
Existing neurocognitive theories have mainly concentrated on the disruptive aspects of psychedelics, such as cognitive disruption, cortical-thalamic filtering disturbances, and disordered/entropic brain states, but they fail to fully account for the emergence of new beneficial behaviors, responses, and insights. This paper proposes a novel framework that shifts the focus from the disruptive...
The extent to which the metaverse will become a site for religious and spiritual experience depends on how the aims of users align with the new medium’s potentialities for action, or “affordances”. Affordances are formed as the social, technological, and contextual capacities of a medium are recognized and then enacted by users. This exploratory essay argues that the metaverse’s affordances,...
Dreaming is a universal human behavior that has inspired searches for meaning across many disciplines including art, psychology, religion, and politics, yet its function remains poorly understood. Given the suggested role of sleep in emotional memory processing, we investigated whether reported overnight dreaming and dream content are associated with sleep-dependent changes in emotional memory...