Abstract Background: Yoga, rooted in the spiritual discipline of ancient Indian sages, has been widely adopted as a means to promote psychological well-being in modern times. Despite growing interest, rigorous scientific evaluation of the specific effects of Asanas (postures) and Pranayama (breathing techniques) on the psychological health of homemakers remains limited. Objectives: This study...
In his recent critique of well-established simplified comparisons between the human mind and AI, Alva Noë encourages us to 'rage against the machine' (Noë, 2024). In this article, I build on Noë's timely encouragement, and sketch perspectives from both music studies and enactivist philosophy in order to interrogate what musicking might add to the debate. As a case study, I explore the recent...
Exteriorization expresses different meanings in the field of philosophy that often lead to various conclusions categorized within the theories of extended mind. Slovak philosopher Pavol Strauss (1912-1994) tends to focus on the notion of exteriorization under his phenomenological-existentialist optic. Strauss understands exteriorization under the structure of his anthropological conception of...
The history of mental science is marked by a divide between the subjective, energetic models of psychoanalysis and the objective models of computational neuroscience. Reductionist approaches often fail to bridge this gap or adequately explain the structural complexity of psychopathology. This conceptual synthesis aims to propose a unified, testable neurocomputational framework anchored in the...
A study of participants attending public concerts that staged classical and contemporary chamber music had the goal to analyse the associations between self-reported experiences and physiological responses, hence addressing a core question of embodied cognition. A sample of 690 participants was recruited, whose physiological signals were recorded with wearable sensors during concerts. After the...
Dreams have fascinated humankind since antiquity and have transcended cultures, religions, and scientific paradigms. From prophetic visions and divine messages to neurophysiological phenomena and psychological expressions of the unconscious, dreams occupy a unique position at the interface of the mind, body, and soul. Ancient civilizations interpret dreams as supernatural communication, while...
Car sickness, an enormous vehicular travel challenge, affects a significant proportion of the population. Pharmacological interventions are limited by adverse side effects, and effective nonpharmacological alternatives remain to be identified. Here, we introduce a novel attention-shifting method based on a closed-loop, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, wearable mindfulness brain-computer...
The engineering of consciousness preservation (whether through whole-brain emulation, cryonic revival, or brain-computer interfaces) proceeds largely without reference to theories of consciousness. This is a remarkable omission. The choice of what must be preserved in a brain depends entirely on what generates consciousness, and the major theories disagree on this question by many orders of...
Patients with diabetic nephropathy (DN) often experience negative emotions and a decline in quality of life, conditions in which the neuro-endocrine-immune axis plays a crucial role. In this study, we explored the effects of an eight-week multimodal psychological intervention, incorporating cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, and relaxation training, on DN patients. Ninety...
This paper develops a quadripartite panpsychist theory of shamanism(s). This fourpart framework revives and combines four theories: (i) mystical constructivism, (ii) role-taking theory, and (iii) mental imagery cultivation as a cultural practice founded upon (iv) a panpsychist philosophy of ultimate reality. I argue that this quadripartite model allows for the recognition of something ‘real’ in...