Advances in Consciousness Research
October 22, 2009
Gordon G. Globus
The Transparent Becoming of World undertakes a penetrating inquiry into the quotidian world we take for granted and the brain that silently hoists our bubbles of world-thrownness. After critiquing the traditional views of direct realism, indirect realism and idealism, the continual becoming of world is explained by a novel integration of process dynamics, as formulated by Whitehead, Heidegger...
History of the Human Sciences
October 2009
Alfred I Tauber
Freud (and later commentators) have failed to explain how the origins of psychoanalytical theory began with a positivist investment without recognizing a dual epistemological commitment: simply, Freud engaged positivism because he believed it generally equated with empiricism, which he valued, and he rejected "philosophy," and, more specifically, Kantianism, because of the associated...
October 1, 2009
Ravi Prakash, S. Sarkhel, P. Rastogi et al.
Abstract The Yogic literatures are replete with examples of several unique mystical experiences in deeper states of meditation. These experiences have nevertheless remained largely untouched by the scientific community, possibly because of the extreme inexplicability of such states and the lack of sophistication in evaluating them. More amenable to scientific research, however, would seem to be...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 10, 2009
Kelly Bulkeley
This paper systematizes the word search potential of DreamBank.net (Domhoff & Schneider, 2008a, 2008b) by formulating and testing a set of word strings that can be used as default analytic categories in future investigations. The word strings are applied to the 981 dream reports of college students gathered by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) and the 136 dream reports of an 80-year old male...
Pharmacopsychiatry
August 31, 2009
Torsten Passie
The classification of psychoactive substances (stimulants, entactogens, hallucinogens) in the frame of psychopharmacology was not worked on since the 1960s. Based on the authors empirical and theoretical research about the psychophysical correlates of waking altered states of consciousness, he lecture will present a recently developed new classification of psychoactive substances. Method: The...
arXiv Preprint Archive
July 28, 2009
Rajat Kumar Pradhan
preprint
A phenomenological approach using the states of spin-like observables is developed to understand the nature of consciousness and the totality of experience. The three states of consciousness are taken to form the triplet of eigenstates of a spin-one entity and are derived as the triplet resulting from the composition of two spins by treating the subject and the object as interacting two-state,...
April 30, 2009
G. Schutz
In the first part of the essay, I describe phenomenologically the transition between dreaming and wakefulness in order to determine whether a reliable dream memory can result from this transition (after all, we have no evidence of our dreams other than our memories). This description shows that this is indeed the case and indicates the conditions under which we can apprehend dreams without...
A Phenomenological Inquiry into the North American Shaman's Experience of the Altered State of Consciousness
April 1, 2009
Antti Revonsuo, Sakari Kallio, Pilleriin Sikka
“Altered State of Consciousness” (ASC) has been defined as a changed overall pattern of conscious experience, or as the subjective feeling and explicit recognition that one's own subjective experience has changed. We argue that these traditional definitions fail to draw a clear line between altered and normal states of consciousness (NSC). We outline a new definition of ASC and argue that the...
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
March 27, 2009
C. Jacobson
This article examines nightmare narratives collected as part of a person-centered ethnographic study of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and supernaturalism in a mainland Puerto Rican community in the late 1990s. Utilizing a descriptive backdrop informed by cross-cultural studies of ASCs and highlighting the relevance of recent insights from the cognitive sciences of religion and from the...
March 26, 2009
David G Watson
2 citations
I examined the associations among sleep-related experiences (e.g., hypnagogic hallucinations, nightmares, waking dreams, lucid dreams), dissociation, schizotypy and the Big Five personality traits in two large student samples. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that (a) dissociation and schizotypy are strongly correlated—yet distinguishable— constructs and (b) the differentiation between...