Kaeli Zimmermann, Keith M. Kendrick, Dirk Scheele et al.
preprint
ABSTRACT Public perception of cannabis as relatively harmless, alongside claimed medical benefits, have led to moves towards its legalization. Yet, long-term consequences of cannabis dependence, and whether they differ qualitatively from other drugs, are still poorly understood. A key feature of addictive drugs is that chronic use leads to adaptations in reward processing, blunting responsivity...
Emese Kroon, Yara J Toenders, Lauren Kuhns et al.
preprint
Background. The global increase in lenient cannabis policy has been paralleled by reduced harm perception, which has been associated with cannabis use initiation and persistent use. However, it is unclear how cultural attitudes towards cannabis use might affect the brain processes underlying cannabis use. Methods. Resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) within and between the executive...
Joseph J Trukovich
preprint
This paper presents a unified framework for quantifying recursive complexity and consciousness across physical, biological, and cognitive systems. Building on the Reaction to Reflection (R2R) model of recursive evolution, we introduce two metrics—Emergent Recursive Expression (ERE) and the Recursive Conscious Phase Index (Ψ)—to capture the structural constraints and dynamic activation of...
Rajiv Singh
Consciousness appears so mysterious and hard to formulate within the physical sciences because present-day scientific thinking excludes an element of reality and a general mechanics of its processing from its consideration. The primary missing element is the reality of information in the physical universe as an intrinsic causal correlate of observable physical states. Moreover, there exists a...
Ashkan Farhadi
preprint
Almost 70 years ago, Alan Turing predicted that within half a century, computers would possess processing capabilities sufficient to fool interrogators into believing they were communicating with a human. While his prediction materialized slightly later than anticipated, he also foresaw a critical limitation: machines might never become the subject of their own thoughts, suggesting that...
Vinitha Ganesan, Priyam Singh, Ritu Aneja et al.
preprint
Rhythmic breathwork rooted in yogic tradition has been associated with stress reduction, partly through modulation of autonomic balance via increased parasympathetic vagal activity. However, the integrated psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms through which these autonomic shifts translate into downstream immune and molecular changes remain incompletely characterized. We conducted a pilot randomized...
Ayumi Ikeda, Takahiro Kawabe
preprint
When external sensory input is reduced, perceptual experience may become more dependent on internally generated information, bodily signals, and prior expectations. Sensory deprivation therefore provides a useful context for examining how people perceive changes in the surrounding environment when ordinary exteroceptive evidence is unavailable. The present study investigated whether...
Muhammad Sudais
preprint
Abstract Sleep paralysis is a state of consciousness experienced while waking from sleep or falling asleep. It is characterized by an experience of being unable to move for several seconds or minutes. Sleep paralysis entails a period of paralysis upon waking or falling asleep and is often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. Many stressful environmental factors which cause emotional stress...
Pouria Javaheri
Generative world models enable robotic agents to "dream" potential futures for planning. However, modeling rigid-body dynamics in high-dimensional compressed latent spaces (such as NVIDIA Cosmos) presents significant challenges. Standard deterministic approaches often suffer from conditional mean averaging (often visually mistaken for posterior collapse), resulting in blurry predictions, while...
Rex Igwe, Divine Allen, Goodness Nwanna
preprint
Abstract Consciousness arises from coordinated neural network activity but is exquisitely sensitive to molecular perturbations, such as those induced by anesthetic agents. Predicting how molecular-level pharmacology propagates through networks to produce EEG-level signatures remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Here, we introduce a fractional-order neural field model that rigorously...