The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology
September 5, 2018
Ruth Finnegan
Forms of “altered” consciousness are common in human life yet at the same time (apart from dreams) seldom investigated in depth by anthropologists. The main areas where such states of consciousness have been found, and up to a point studied, are dreaming, including prophetic and creative dreams; sensations of contact of various kinds with and from the dead; the experience of music, poetry and...
September 4, 2018
Marc Wittmann
What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been...
Philosophy and Cosmology
September 1, 2018
Syamala Hari
3 citations
In the ancient Hindu philosophy known as Vedanta, the mind -understood as an accumulation of memories, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc., including the self, that is, the 'I'-thought present in every conscious experience -is said to be a sense like any other physical sense: see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. The implication is that mind is also instrumental in creating our conscious experiences...
Scientific Reports
August 20, 2018
Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, Antti Revonsuo
56 citations
Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams. However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology. We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of...
Nature Communications
August 17, 2018
Stephen LaBerge, Benjamin Baird, Philip G. Zimbardo
Humans are typically unable to engage in sustained smooth pursuit for imagined objects. However, it is unknown to what extent smooth tracking occurs for visual imagery during REM sleep dreaming. Here we examine smooth pursuit eye movements during tracking of a slow-moving visual target during lucid dreams in REM sleep. Highly similar smooth pursuit tracking was observed during both waking...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
August 1, 2018
Nicholas E. Brink
As an anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman examined the effect of what she believed to be the ritual body postures of shamans, both current and ancient, and found that they gave direction to their shamanic journeying. This research of Goodman and now James Honeycutt opens a new door, a new tool that can be an important addition to the tools of psychotherapy. In her research of ecstatic trance,...
Nature Reviews Neurology
August 2018
Anna Castelnovo, Régis Lopez, Paola Proserpio et al.
Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep parasomnias (or NREM parasomnias) are fascinating disorders with mysterious neurobiological substrates. These conditions are common and often severe, with social, personal and forensic implications. The NREM parasomnias include sleepwalking, sleep terrors and confusional arousals - collectively termed disorders of arousal (DOAs) - as well as less well-known...
International Journal of Astrobiology
July 30, 2018
R. Wallace
Abstract The Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties will not have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, evolutionary trajectory found on Earth. Are many alien organisms likely to be individually conscious in ways we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will alien consciousness require a ‘sleep...
IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life
July 18, 2018
Keisuke Suzuki, Warrick Roseboom, David J. Schwartzman et al.
Simulating phenomenological aspects of altered states of consciousness provides an important experimental tool for consciousness science and psychiatry. Here we describe the Hallucination Machine, ...
July 9, 2018
Kazimierz Jałowczyk
Imagination is one of the most important characteristics of human mind. The language of imagination is created by ideas and mental images. The activity of imagination is expressed by various notions such as fantasy, intuition, invention, narration, inspiration, stimulus, and dream. Imagination functions and develops autonomously in relation to the outside world. It is not subordinate to strict...