Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry
August 1, 2026
Christian N. Schmitz, Marijan Bernardic, Anamaria-Domnica Vlădoiu et al.
High ventilation breathwork (HVB) is increasingly used in psychotherapeutic and contemplative contexts to induce altered states of consciousness (ASC), yet its neurobiological mechanisms remain poorly understood. Thirty experienced HVB practitioners (mean age 44.97 ± 11.80 years) underwent perfusion and resting-state fMRI to assess acute cerebrovascular and post-acute network changes. Cerebral...
Journal of Affective Disorders
August 1, 2026
Guy M. Goodwin, Scott T Aaronson, Oscar Alvarez et al.
2 citations
The contribution of patient support to psilocybin's antidepressant effects remains uncertain. Relationships between therapeutic alliance (Scale to Assess Therapeutic Relationship-Patient version; STAR-P), psychedelic experience (Five-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Questionnaire and Emotional Breakthrough Inventory; 5D-ASC and EBI) and clinical outcomes (Montgomery-Åsberg Depression...
American Behavioral Scientist
July 31, 2026
Harvey W. Kushner
Marshall McLuhan’s work on media and technology remains highly relevant to contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on human consciousness. This article examines McLuhan’s conception of media as extensions of human faculties and explores his contention that media technologies reshape not only patterns of communication but also modes of perception, cognition, and...
arXiv.org
July 30, 2026
Junsol Kim, Winnie Street, R. Rocca et al.
preprint
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models'tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 29, 2026
Micah Blumberg
preprint
This corrected preprint presents its research question, method, bounded result, and principal limitations in a standardized reader-facing format. Neural tissue contains no single executive that inspects every available action, yet an organism can maintain alternatives, commit to one action, monitor its consequences, and alter later behavior. This paper proposes a multiscale model in which...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 29, 2026
Alison King, Darryl Gray
Consciousness research often uses overlapping terms such as consciousness, awareness, conscious access, subjective experience, reportability, selfhood, and metacognition. This conceptual compression can make it difficult to distinguish different awareness-related processes or to identify which capacities are preserved, disrupted, or restored across altered states. This paper proposes an...
Philosophical Psychology
July 27, 2026
Orli Dahan
This article examines how relational environments shape the structure of consciousness in contexts that require the temporary suspension of cognitive control. Through the case of birthing consciousness, conceptualized as an adaptive altered state that may emerge during physiological labor, the article argues that certain forms of consciousness are constitutively relational. While dominant...
Ideas y Valores
July 26, 2026
Felipe De Brigard
Muchos psiquiatras se encuentran constantemente con pacientes cuyos síntomas incluyen trastornos o alteraciones de la conciencia. Infortunadamente, el significado del término conciencia es poco claro. Este artículo hace un repaso sistemático de varios significados atribuidos a dicho término, así como de diversos problemas filosóficos asociados. Asimismo, reconstruye varias teorías filosóficas...
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
July 24, 2026
Peter A Cariani, Janet M. Baker
Along the lines of neuronal global workspace theories, the paper hypothesizes that active neural signal regeneration in recurrent, re-entrant circuits could constitute an organizational basis for states of conscious awareness. In this view, brains are self-production systems that regenerate their own informational, signal states ("neural autopoiesis"). States of awareness themselves depend...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 22, 2026
Nina Zech, Martin H. J. Busch, Veronika K. Jaeger et al.
Introduction Mind-body interventions (MBIs) increasingly used in health care include alterations in the ordinary state of consciousness that might be essential for their effects on psychological and physical patterns encoded in the unconscious. Little is known about the effects of repeated practice or the time of the repetitions. Methods EEG-derived Bispectral-Index (BIS) is clinically used to...