This brief report summarizes a keynote address delivered at The Mind’s Ear and Inner Voice 2025 conference. Anauralia refers to absence of internal imagery for sound – lack of a mind’s ear. Findings from a project investigating psychological implications of individual differences in sensory imagery, with a particular focus on auditory imagery and anauralia, are outlined. We begin by reporting...
Abstract This essay orbits around an anthropological-cognitive question: who (and what) is the human being to whom human rights should be recognized and with reference to whom these rights are to be tailored in outer space or on other celestial bodies? It is commonly accepted that human rights are universal and therefore must also be applied in outer space or off-Earth environments. The...
Background: The medical students experience a lot of stress, which increase when they appear for internal assessment examination. Yoga as an anxiolytic tool which has been practiced over centuries in India. Aims and Objectives: To assess the efficacy of yoga in increasing the cognitive performance in medical students after practicing it for 6 months. Materials and Methods: A comparative study...
For ages, scientists have viewed consciousness as some sort of magic trick that suddenly appears when brains achieve a certain level of complexity. What if, however, consciousness has existed all along, even at the smallest levels? Here, I am suggesting a different take: what if consciousness started down at the very subatomic level, and indeed, it was present at the earliest moment? Initially,...
Background: Memory is the storage of acquired knowledge for later recall. Learning and memory form the basis by which individuals adapt their behavior to their particular external circumstances. Without these mechanisms, it would be impossible for individuals to plan for successful interactions and to intentionally avoid predictably disagreeable circumstances. Yoga unites the individual self...
BACKGROUND: Dissociation, a disruption in the coherent integration of experience, is increasingly recognized as a clinically relevant yet underexplored phenomenon in epilepsy. While psychobehavioral symptoms such as anxiety and depression are routinely addressed in epilepsy care, dissociation remains understudied and formal assessment frameworks to better evaluate and integrate dissociative...
Background: Yoga and meditation are associated with improvement in both physical and mental health. Brahmakumari meditation is concerned with awareness of the metaphysical self with reorientating thought patterns and feelings so one can live with positive thinking, greater harmony, and contentment. EEG gives meaningful insight about the state of mind of an individual. Aims and Objectives: The...
Abstract Our experience is pervaded with affect—positive or negative felt valence. Affect is thought to play a crucial role not just in emotions and moods, but also in perception, cognition, and decision-making. What might happen, then, if affect is disrupted? Subjects suffering from depersonalization give us an idea. There is significant evidence that depersonalization is in part an affective...
This paper develops a neurophilosophical account of rationality by arguing that what is commonly referred to as “reason” does not correspond to a unified or central faculty in the brain. Drawing on contemporary neuroscience, including predictive processing frameworks, distributed models of valuation, and prefrontal control systems, the paper shows that cognition emerges from the dynamic...
Background: Emerging evidence suggests that the ability to sense internal bodily signals, interoceptive awareness, is central to embodied consciousness and adaptive self-regulation. Yet, the cognitive mechanisms by which interoceptive processes shape the continuity of conscious experience remain insufficiently understood. One such mechanism may be time perspective, a framework reflecting...