ABSTRACT Intense aesthetic experiences are among the most complex responses arising from the interaction of mind, brain, and context. Observations from fMRI suggest that when viewers feel highly moved by artworks, the underlying neural states differ from those accompanying less intense responses, particularly through recruitment of the DMN. Using electroencephalography and Bayesian...
The neural basis of self-consciousness has been intensively investigated for decades, with numerous studies characterizing distributed brain areas engaged in self-related processing. Despite systematic descriptions of core brain regions and functional architectures in previous reviews, a unified theoretical framework explaining the mechanisms of self-consciousness has yet to be established....
The paper is Article 1 of the Pali-Psycho series. It focuses on the empirical and clinical comparison axis: mindfulness, breath meditation, compassion cultivation, absorption states, affect labeling, default-mode-network findings, and selected positive-psychology parallels are treated as modern comparison points for Pali-canonical practice architectures. The central result is deliberately...
Abstract Current medical and ethical standards governing organ harvesting under anesthesia rest on an assumption that has never been formally tested: that the absence of behavioral response and narrative consciousness constitutes the absence of all consciousness. This paper argues that this assumption is both scientifically unexamined and potentially incorrect. Drawing on a documented model of...
This document sets out a theoretical framework — not a finding — for a proposed approach in which a person's own deeply meaningful music serves as the substrate for an intervention intended to extend the positive affective state that music evokes beyond the listening session itself. The framework is pre-empirical: hypotheses are stated to be falsifiable, mechanisms are ranked by evidence, and...
Suicide, the individual desire to take one's own life, at whose core lies the unbearable psychological pain Shneidman called psychache, is a uniquely human experience. Unlike depression, suicidality has no preclinical analog. Suicidality and chronic depression, long treated as a single clinical entity, are increasingly recognized as partly separable in neurobiology and treatment response....
Nature CommunicationsJune 5, 2026Maxwell B Wang, Max G'Sell, James F Castellano et al.
Critical real-world neurocognitive processes, such as settling into a conversation and neurophysiological fluctuations, vary over minutes-to-days in real-world environments. We harnessed simultaneous multi-electrode intracranial and video recordings in twenty people during a week of unconstrained, spontaneous behavior. Using dynamical deep learning algorithms, we found neurodynamics linked to...
This article examines the yogic and Vedantic frameworks for understanding the human mind — specifically the Pancha Kosha model (five sheaths of consciousness) and the Antahkarana model (the fourfold inner instrument of Manas, Buddhi, Chitta, and Ahamkara) — in dialogue with current neuroscience of consciousness, attention, memory, and self-referential processing. The five Koshas are examined:...
People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are correlated across individuals during shared experiences, suggesting a role in representing high-level event features. However, it remains unclear whether these shared neural patterns reflect...
Reviews in the NeurosciencesJune 3, 2026Thomas Le François, Charlotte E Hilberdink, Bérengère Guillery-Girard et al.
Mindfulness meditation has received growing interest in research over the past decades. Mindfulness meditation training (MMT) can be employed as a mental practice to improve cognitive skills such as attention and emotion regulation and may promote well-being. Neuroimaging studies have emerged to understand the effects of MMT on brain functioning. However, no review exists on the effects of MMT...