Frontiers in Education
March 17, 2022
Kevin Rebecchi, Hélène Hagège
12 citations
Researchers have recently turned their focus to a specific area: the links between altered states of consciousness and creativity. A spectrum of attentional states of consciousness exists, from hypnagogia and mind wandering to mindfulness and flow. These attentional states of consciousness are present during a variety of activities (e.g., sports, music, painting, writing, video games, theater,...
Frontiers in Neuroscience
March 17, 2022
Devon Stoliker, Gary F. Egan, Adeel Razi
19 citations
Evidence suggests classic psychedelics reduce the precision of belief updating and enable access to a range of alternate hypotheses that underwrite how we make sense of the world. This process, in the higher cortices, has been postulated to explain the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics for the treatment of internalizing disorders. We argue reduced precision also underpins change to...
Science Advances
March 16, 2022
Galen Ballentine, Samuel Freesun Friedman, Danilo Bzdok
66 citations
Psychedelics probably alter states of consciousness by disrupting how the higher association cortex governs bottom-up sensory signals. Individual hallucinogenic drugs are usually studied in participants in controlled laboratory settings. Here, we have explored word usage in 6850 free-form testimonials about 27 drugs through the prism of 40 neurotransmitter receptor subtypes, which were then...
March 14, 2022
Rick Repetti
4 citations
What is the sound of one mind meditating? Is it philosophically valid? The Taoist path is one of harmonizing with the Tao, the Way – to inner peace, practical wisdom, and philosophical enlightenment. Similar views have defined a number of schools of Asian philosophy for millennia. Sages across many Asian traditions have held that philosophical insights alone are insufficient for enlightenment,...
March 14, 2022
Christian Coseru
4 citations
Nirvana is sometimes described as stopping the world – transcending what phenomenologists describe as the (conventional) life-world. This chapter examines the implications of cognitive attenuation in such meditative absorptions, raising philosophical and phenomenological questions about the ways examination of such states, and their neuroscientific underpinnings, may play a role in resolving...
Technium Social Sciences Journal
March 9, 2022
Eleni Mitsea, Athanasios Drigas, C. Skianis
The purpose of the current review study is to shed light on the relationship between respiration and attention. Specifically, we examined whether and how respiration can provoke alterations in attentional states. Secondly, we investigated the benefits of breath-control training techniques in attention. Furthermore, we explored the effectiveness of virtual reality breathing training in improving...
C&EN Global Enterprise
March 7, 2022
Bethany Halford
Over the past decade, psychedelic compounds like psilocybin and ecstasy have emerged as potentially life-changing treatments for mental illnesses, including major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. Read on to learn how some companies are trying to bring these once-demonized drugs to market and how others are hoping to use chemistry to eliminate their hallucinogenic effects—a...
Frontiers in Psychology
March 4, 2022
Agnieszka D. Sekula, Luke A. Downey, Prashanth Puspanathan
27 citations
Psychotherapy with the use of psychedelic substances, including psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ketamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), has demonstrated promise in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PP) represents a unique psychopharmacological model that...
BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBLISHERS eBooks
March 3, 2022
Raul Valverde
For decades, altered states of consciousness have been used as a form ofpsychotherapy in transpersonal psychology. Although there are well-known techniquesfor inducing altered states of consciousness, such as holotropic breathwork,neurotechnology provides an alternative method for not only generating these states fortranspersonal therapy but also for measuring the level of a state of...
Philosophia
March 1, 2022
Luca Dondoni
Abstract: One of the most pressing challenges that occupy the Russellian panpsychist’s agenda is to come up with a way to reconcile the traditional argument from categorical properties (Seager Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10–11), 129–145, 2006; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) with H. H. Mørch’s dispositionalism-friendly argument from the experience of causation (2014, Topoi, 39, 1073–1088,...