This study examines how the contemplative atmosphere of the Santa Maria Scala Coeli Monastery in Évora, Portugal, has been sustained despite the transition of its resident religious community from the male Carthusian Order to a female contemplative community of the Servidoras do Senhor e da Virgem de Matará. The research aims to analyze how spatial enclosure, temporal discipline, and embedded...
Fides et ratioMarch 29, 2026Floralba del Rocío Aguilar Gordón, Robert Fernando Bolaños Vivas, Catya Ximena Torres Cordero
The article reflects on the human mind as a philosophical problem, approaching it from an analytical and historical perspective. Its central aim is to offer a critical and contextualized understanding of how philosophy of mind has attempted to answer fundamental questions about consciousness, subjectivity and the mind-body relationship. It begins with a conceptual approach that defines...
Does conscious brain state leave a measurable trace in single neurons? Here I propose a direct electrophysiological test. Using within-neuron patch-clamp recordings across wakefulness, anesthesia, and recovery, I predict that action potentials from the same neuron will show reversible shifts in spike threshold of 0.5 - 3 \mathrm{mV} that correlate with conscious state. This prediction is...
Thinking is a multifaceted process that encompasses logical, inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning, as well as planning, recalling past events and previous thoughts, imagining what may or may not happen, and experiencing and feeling affective states. The task of psychology is to explain what these thoughts are. How can physiological, biophysical, and neuronal processes in our bodies and...
The present study aims to develop a yoga therapy healing approach grounded in the Vedantic principle of Tat Tvam Asi, which signifies the essential unity of the individual self with universal consciousness. Rooted in Advaita Vedanta, this principle offers a profound philosophical foundation for understanding inner abundance as a state of self-realisation, inner fulfilment, and holistic...
The use of psychedelics in the treatment of psychopathologies has been expanding, highlighting Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy (PAP) as a promising resource in mental health care. This systematic review investigates. This systematic review investigates whether and how cognitive-behavioral therapies are integrated with psychedelic substances—both classical and atypical—for the treatment of...
bioRxivMarch 27, 2026Cécile Gal, Dimitrios Askitis, Katarina Begus
preprint
Self-reflection is central to human cognition and is arguably a defining feature of human consciousness. Yet, the mechanisms enabling our mind to reflect upon itself and to construct a conceptual sense of self remain poorly understood. This study brings empirical traction to the puzzle of self-reflection by studying human infants, across the period when a conceptual self is believed to emerge,...
Our prior research with indigenous school children and adolescents in Perú, often in remote high-altitude Andean locations, mostly centres on an exploration of health and school performance and their relation to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, an easy-to-learn technique for mental and physiological rest and stress reduction. We have established that higher levels of health and school...
The biological mind is created by brain activity, and the mind's experiences and thoughts can change its structure and function. To construct a digital twin brain, it is possible to decode the unique activity of the human brain for each of the mental faculties responsible for all mental phenomena, create their digital twins, and connect them to the reconstructed and simulated neural circuits of...
Many terms have been invented to describe different types of hallucinogenic drugs, sometimes based on an analogy with the symptoms of schizophrenia, such as “psychotomimetic” and “phrenotropic.” “Psychedelics” refers to drugs that act as agonists at serotonin 5-HT2A receptors in the brain; they include psilocybin, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (tryptamine derivatives),...