PLoS One
June 30, 2014
Enrico Amico, Francisco Gómez, Carol di Perri et al.
115 citations
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have been shown that functional connectivity of cerebral areas is not a static phenomenon, but exhibits spontaneous fluctuations over time. There is evidence that fluctuating connectivity is an intrinsic phenomenon of brain dynamics that persists during anesthesia. Lately, point process analysis applied on functional data has revealed that much of the information...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
May 30, 2014
Tereza Nekovářová, Iveta Fajnerová, Jiří Horáček et al.
Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder with variable symptomatology, traditionally divided into positive and negative symptoms, and cognitive deficits. However, the etiology of this disorder has yet to be fully understood. Recent findings suggest that alteration of the basic sense of self-awareness may be an essential distortion of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In addition,...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
May 27, 2014
Leor Roseman, Robert Leech, Amanda Feilding et al.
293 citations
Perturbing a system and observing the consequences is a classic scientific strategy for understanding a phenomenon. Psychedelic drugs perturb consciousness in a marked and novel way and thus are powerful tools for studying its mechanisms. In the present analysis, we measured changes in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between a standard template of different independent components...
PLoS One
May 13, 2014
Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski, Daniel J. Lurie, Sebastian Urchs et al.
180 citations
Although neural activity often reflects the processing of external inputs, intrinsic fluctuations in activity have been observed throughout the brain. These may relate to patterns of self-generated thought that can occur while not performing goal-driven tasks. To understand the relationship between self-generated mental activity and intrinsic neural fluctuations, we developed the New York...
Brain and Behavior
February 12, 2014
Kathleen A. Garrison, Dustin Scheinost, R. Todd Constable et al.
80 citations
Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as "may all beings be happy," to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood...
Neuroimage
February 1, 2014
Martin Ulrich, Johannes Keller, Klaus Hoenig et al.
Flow refers to a positive, activity-associated, subjective experience under conditions of a perceived fit between skills and task demands. Using functional magnetic resonance perfusion imaging, we investigated the neural correlates of flow in a sample of 27 human subjects. Experimentally, in the flow condition participants worked on mental arithmetic tasks at challenging task difficulty which...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
2014
Judson A. Brewer, Kathleen A Garrison
There has been an increased interest in mindfulness and meditation training over the past decade. As evidenced by exponential growth in the number of publications since the beginning of the 21st century, progressively more is becoming known about both the clinical efficacy and underlying neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness training. This paper briefly highlights psychological models of...
Frontiers in Psychology
2014
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Joseph Glicksohn
72 citations
Every experience, those we are aware of and those we are not, is embedded in a subjective timeline, is tinged with emotion, and inevitably evokes a certain sense of self. Here, we present a phenomenological model for consciousness and selfhood which relates time, awareness, and emotion within one framework. The consciousness state space (CSS) model is a theoretical one. It relies on a broad...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2014
Robin Carhart-Harris, Robert Leech, Peter J. Hellyer et al.
1,289 citations
Entropy is a dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high entropy is synonymous with high disorder. Entropy is applied here in the context of states of consciousness and their associated neurodynamics, with a particular focus on the psychedelic state. The psychedelic state is considered an exemplar...
Frontiers in Psychology
September 23, 2013
Rebecca McMillan, Scott Barry Kaufman, Jerome L Singer
Nearly 60 years ago, Jerome L. Singer launched a groundbreaking research program into daydreaming (Singer, 1955, 1975, 2009) that presaged and laid the foundation for virtually every major strand of mind wandering research active today (Antrobus, 1999; Klinger, 1999, 2009). Here we review Singer's enormous contribution to the field, which includes insights, methodologies, and tools still in use...