Bruno Abbondanza
preprint
Nonordinary experiences of consciousness, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, mystical states, psychedelic experiences, and profound alterations of self-experience, are often interpreted through neuropsychological and psychiatric categories such as hallucination, dissociation, perceptual alteration, or brain anomaly. Such categories are clinically necessary when the...
Samson Odan
preprint
The human brain, a highly complex dynamical system, exhibits various states of consciousness—such as wakefulness, sleep, and altered states—each characterized by distinct patterns of neural activity. To capture the dynamical properties of these states, a range of complexity measures is utilized, with a primary focus on Statistical Complexity (SC) and Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc), and...
Brandon G. Truax
preprint
ABSTRACT Aims To investigate real-world treatment attrition, concomitant use of pharmaceuticals with known drug-interactions, total cost of care, claims-based outcomes, and health disparities for individuals initiated on esketamine therapy in the United States. Methods Individuals aged 18-64 with >=1 adjudicated claim for esketamine intranasal spray from 2019 to 2022 in the Optum Labs Data...
Acharya Pt Dr Avdhesh Kumarr
preprint
Near-death experiences (NDEs) and reports of memories of previous lives have traditionally been investigated as separate categories of exceptional human experience. NDE research primarily examines experiences occurring during or around episodes of severe physiological crisis, whereas reincarnation research has focused particularly on young children who spontaneously report memories apparently...
Maria Bălăeţ, Jen Culley, Elena Paparello et al.
preprint
This case report examines the profound experience of spontaneous, unmedicated labour in a home setting. The 28-year-old woman, with a prior history of emergency caesarean section due to failed induction of labour, underwent a natural labour and birth that elicited an altered state of consciousness. During labour, she experienced significant euphoria, and a unique perceptual alteration of her...
George Deane, Daphne Demekas
preprint
Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) refers to the simplest form of conscious experience, characterized by the absence of time, self, and sensory content, where only pure awareness or consciousness remains. In this paper, we present a computational neurophenomenological account of minimal phenomenal experience within the active inference framework. We propose a generative mechanism that allows...
Camilo Libedinsky
preprint
This paper presents an extension of the "neural replay thought experiment" as a heuristic tool for probing the reader’s implicit assumptions regarding the relationship between physical and mental phenomena. By systematically varying the physical instantiation of a recorded neural activity pattern, we aim to elicit divergent intuitions about the persistence of consciousness and intelligence. The...
George Fejer, Till Holzapfel, Taru Hirvonen et al.
preprint
Abstract Breath-based interactions in virtual reality typically map breathing onto discrete visual objects or physiological proxies. Viscereality instead translates respiratory state into a surrounding particle field, mapping lung volume onto external space so that inhalation expands the environment and exhalation contracts it. Because particle fields have no fixed boundary, they can convey...
Neuropsychobiology
H Herzog, V R Lele, T Kuwert et al.
Using positron emission tomography (PET), measurements of the regional cerebral metabolic rate of glucose (rCMRGlc) are able to delineate cerebral metabolic responses to external or mental stimulation. In order to examine possible changes of brain metabolism due to Yoga meditation PET scans were performed in 8 members of a Yoga meditation group during the normal control state (C) and Yoga...
Jesús Isaac Castillo-Sánchez
preprint
Abstract The COMP006 Phase 3 trial showed that 39% of patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) respond to a single 25 mg dose of psilocybin, while 61% do not — at identical dose, protocol, and pharmacological exposure. No mechanistic explanation for this heterogeneity has been established. Here we propose and validate a two-threshold model in which the psilocybin dose-response...