bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 28, 2026
Gabriela Sawicka, Marian Martínez-Marín, Christopher Timmermann et al.
preprint
Psychedelic compounds such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) induce rapid and profound changes in conscious experience, requiring neuroimaging measures that capture how brain dynamics evolve across space and time. Emerging evidence suggests that rotational (vortex-like) dynamics may contribute to the coordination of large-scale neural activity. Here, we introduce two vorticity-based metrics;...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 26, 2026
Douwe Fennema
preprint
Abstract During wakefulness, experience continually changes the functional organization of neural networks. Repetition, attention, emotional significance, and other forms of experience-dependent activation can affect the relative strength of synaptic relationships (Hebb, 1949; Bliss & Lømo, 1973; Dudek & Bear, 1992). During sleep, direct coupling to external sensory input and behavioral output...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 25, 2026
Graham Kellen
preprint
The Non-Existence Awareness Hypothesis for Artificial Self-Preservation proposes that an important threshold in advanced artificial intelligence may occur before consciousness or sentience: the capacity of a persistent artificial agent to represent a future state in which its own computational process no longer exists, and to alter its behaviour in response to that representation. The note...
Cureus
September 24, 2026
Angelos Kandilas, Alexandros Samolis, Theodosis Kalamatianos et al.
Self-awareness encompasses the capacity to recognize and evaluate information about oneself, including mental states, actions, autobiographical history, and bodily experience.Although closely related to consciousness, autobiographical memory, metacognition, clinical insight, anosognosia, and bodily selfconsciousness, these constructs are not interchangeable.This focused narrative review...
September 23, 2026
Luis Miguel Gallardo
Breathwork practices include traditional yogic pranayama and modern therapeutic protocols. Pranayama is the practice of manipulating breathing, which serves as a dynamic link between the mind and body, and is well known in traditional Indian medicine. (Podder et al., 2025) Autonomic modulation is altered by yoga breathing patterns, which results in modifications to cardiovascular functioning...
Research Square
September 23, 2026
Dana Kvietkute
preprint
Abstract Self-reflection has historically depended on temporal transformations that occurred automatically as life moved on: the past receded, what returned came back altered, the vantage from which it was encountered shifted, and other people changed alongside the person reflecting. Conversational AI decouples these transformations. A person continues to change while parts of the reflective...
Journal of Affective Disorders
September 23, 2026
Erin Curran, Kristina T. Kumpf, Mina Ansari et al.
Ketamine/esketamine produce rapid antidepressant effects, with growing interest in how acute subjective experiences and the surrounding set and setting shape clinical outcomes. Little is known about how audiovisual adjustments during ketamine/esketamine treatment influence comfort, tolerability, or patient experience, despite their common use in clinical practice. Virtual reality (VR) is one...
Time and Mind
September 19, 2026
Brian A. Stewart, Peter J. Mitchell
Inspired by the insights of David Lewis-Williams, rock art research has changed significantly over the past half-century. As he has shown, interpretations of hunter-gatherer rock paintings and engravings in southern Africa depend inextricably on working back and forth between the surviving imagery and its location, on the one hand, and insights from (principally San) ethnographic data on the...
Timing & Time Perception
September 17, 2026
Steve Taylor, Krisztina Egeto-Szabo, Marc Wittmann
Abstract We report the findings of a survey and a qualitative study of “time expansion experiences” (TEEs) in which time subjectively slows down dramatically. We found that 70% of a sample of 1043 US residents reported at least one TEE in their lives, with many people reporting multiple TEEs. The most significant trigger/context of TEEs in our sample was accidents/emergencies (52%), followed by...
npj Mental Health Research
September 17, 2026
U. Lueken, Isabel Dziobek, Martha N. Havenith et al.
High ventilation breathwork (HVB) can induce altered states of consciousness with phenomenological similarities to those reported following administration of serotonergic psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin or ayahuasca. Non-pharmacological methods capable of reliably eliciting such states may provide scalable models for investigating therapeutic mechanisms...