Near-death experiences (NDEs) are episodes of disconnected consciousness that typically occur in situations that involve an actual or potential physical threat or are perceived as such, and the experiences are characterized by a rich content with prototypical mystical features. Several explanatory theories for NDEs have been proposed, ranging from psychological or neurophysiological to...
Brain and BehaviorJune 1, 2025Alessandro Agostini, Sara Ventura, Silvia Tempia Valenta et al.
Crohn's disease (CD) is associated with psychological disorders and insecure attachment styles, potentially reflecting the long-lasting disease effect. Although functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies revealed differences in CD patients relative to HC, the brain properties underlying the attachment dimensions in CD remain scarcely investigated. We carried out an fMRI study to...
Cytotoxic lesions of the corpus callosum (CLOCCs) are a rare clinicoradiologic syndrome, exceptionally rare in association with coronavirus disease (COVID-2019). This study aimed to investigate the neurological features of COVID-19-associated CLOCCs and gain insights into their underlying pathophysiology. A retrospective evaluation was conducted on patients with COVID-19-associated CLOCCs...
Bodily organs such as the heart and the lungs play a crucial role in maintaining physiological homeostasis in a continuous closed-loop interaction with the brain. Beyond their vital role, recent developments have emphasized the remarkable contribution of bodily signals to high-level brain functions. A direct route by which bodily signals influence brain functioning is via modulation of...
There is a poverty of knowledge relating to the transition phase of labour and undisturbed childbirth physiology. This study explored women's experiences of the transition phase of physiological labour during freebirth. Transition within physiological labour is described as a phase occurring as a woman ends the first stage of labour. The woman may display a range of signs and symptoms,...
To many influential dream researchers, dreaming consciousness is not of the same kind as waking. In its most radical and paradoxical form, this theoretical stance consists in maintaining that dream is a case of conscious experience lacking cognitive access. In a more moderate and common form, dreamers have cognitive access to their oneiric experience but lack any executive function: they have...
Kamala Das has always been vocal about the pain and suffering of the women in contemporary times. Her frankness in dealing with the taboo topics of the society invited unwanted controversies for her. The short stories of Kamala Das mostly speak about the uninhibited desires of the females who often face apprehensive behaviour for having their own ideas of sexuality. The paper is an attempt to...
In noisy perceptual environments, people frequently make decisions based on non-perceptual information to maximize rewards. Therefore, a central problem in psychophysics, metacognition and consciousness research is to distinguish between decisions resulting from changes in subjective experience and those arising from non-perceptual information. It has recently been proposed that confidence...
Drug Testing and AnalysisMay 21, 2025Donata Favretto, Antonello Cirnelli, Roberto Pertile et al.2 citations
A child died in the emergency room of a local hospital a few hours after ingesting a substance the color of cork and the consistency of earth. At home, a modest amount of resinous substance was found. At the hospital, the child exhibited alterations in walking, balance, and consciousness. Intubation was needed for the onset of dyspnea, so fentanyl and ketamine were administered during the...
Parkinson's disease (PD) has become the second most prominent neurogenerative disorder relating to aging individuals. PD involves the loss of neurons containing dopamine in the midbrain and leads to a number of motor issues as well as non-motor complications such as cognitive and psychological abnormalities. The default mode network (DMN) is a complex brain network primarily active during rest...