Marijuana is a commonly used substance in the United States for both recreational and medicinal purposes. Detrimental health-related effects of marijuana continue to be a source of controversy. We describe a case of a woman who presented to the emergency department with acute right upper and lower extremity weakness and altered speech after accidental unknown ingestion of food containing...
The main goal of this article consists in addressing two fundamental issues of consciousness research and cognitive science, namely, the question of why declarative memory functions are inextricably linked with phenomenal awareness and the question of the physical basis of memory traces. The presented approach proposes that high-level cognitive processes involving consciousness employ a...
Objective: Constructing a framework to evaluate consciousness is an important issue in neuroscience research and clinical practice. However, there is still no systematic framework for quantifying altered consciousness along the dimensions of both level and content. This study builds a framework to differentiate the following states: coma, general anesthesia, minimally conscious state (MCS), and...
ABSTRACT The literature on ‘mountain mysticism’ includes a wide array of interpretations: Reductively, mystical states experienced on mountains may be viewed as neurological or psychological epiphenomena. Anthropomorphised as mystical agents themselves, the mountain is seen as capable of engendering non-ordinary awareness. This article makes space for interpretations falling outside of or...
Abstract This chapter describes cannabis use and risk for psychosis, the drug's long-term effects on IQ and the modification of THC-related effects by terpenes. These discussions of cannabis raise much wider issues that apply to the myriad of recreational drugs affecting mood and consciousness from legal everyday examples, such as caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol; through the illegal, including...
This article explores the association between creative experience and behavior, and those aspects of waking human consciousness often referred to as altered and transitional states. All these hypothetical constructs (e.g., ‘creativity’ and ‘consciousness’) are social artifacts, viewed differently from culture to culture. As a result, several cross-cultural comparisons are made that demonstrate...
This is a response to John Rowan’s (2019a) paper ‘Do transpersonal psychologists know what they are talking about?’. Two different meditation practices can lead to two different altered states of consciousness, samadhi and satori, the latter being associated with psychotherapeutic insights. Rowan’s article is about samadhi so this paper concentrates on satori, comparing and contrasting the two,...
2020Ludmila Škrabáková, Ondřej Sekanina, Miroslav Horák et al.
RESUMENEste capítulo se encuentra estructurado en forma de ensayo.El objetivo de los autores radica en describir algunos principios clave del chamanismo peruano y tailandés mostrados a través de la pintura.El texto contiene una interpretación de 5 obras del artista peruano Dimas Paredes y 7 obras de la artista tailandesa La Inthonkaew, que sigue una introducción teórica y breves pasajes...
This paper considers poetry, poets and the transpersonal. It first considers the creation of poetry in relation to the transpersonal with the focus on the poet, in particular the role of altered states of consciousness for the poet in the act of creation; the focus then shifts to the reader of poetry to consider if poetry reading can lead to transpersonal states, finding at least that poetry...
For the materialist, the hard problem is fundamentally an explanatory problem. Solving it requires explaining why the relationship between brain and experience is the way it is and not some other way. We use the tools of the interventionist theory of explanation to show how a systematic experimental project could help move beyond the hard problem. Key to this project is the development of...