William James delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and his 20 lectures were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. While the book is a classic in the psychology of religion, little to no attention has been given to the immediate context of James's lectures or his state of mind and perspectives during his delivery of each. This...
AbstractIn this conceptual contribution, we argue that experimental investigations of phenomena in the cognitive sciences and consciousness research may benefit from a thorough integration of data acquired from the first-person perspective. We present a line of research from our lab applying this approach to the Libet task on voluntary action. In this well-known experimental paradigm,...
Breathwork is an understudied school of practices involving intentional respiratory modulation to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We simultaneously investigate the phenomenological and neural dynamics of breathwork by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative methodology that preserves the temporal dynamics of subjective experience, with low-density portable EEG...
Recent decades have witnessed an extraordinary global crisis of drug misuse. Although opioid analgesics receive the most attention, numerous other drugs have increased rates of misuse. Ketamine and esketamine offer a unique natural experiment to explore two medications that are similar pharmacologically but differ in their availability to users and in their regulation by government agencies....
Often deemed a 'black box' resistant to scientific examination, the human mind challenges empirical inquiryparticularly in subjective experiences like dreams.However, objective empirical measures can indeed be applied to such phenomena.While there has been notable progress in understanding human dreams, the domain of sleep and dreams in non-human animals remains less explored.This review paper...
Differences among constructivist, perennialist, and universalist perspectives on mystical experiences are bridged with neurophenomenology and neuroepistemology perspectives that illustrate constructivist and deconditioning processes and universal innate experiences. These approaches show that phenomenal similarities and differences in the features of meditative experiences are related to...
This narrative review explores the utilization of psychedelic states in therapeutic contexts, deliberately shifting the focus from psychedelic substances back to the experiential phenomena they induce, in alignment with the original meaning of the term "mind-manifesting." The review provides an overview of various psychedelic substances used in modern therapeutic settings and ritualistic...
Science on methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and MDMA-like substances is faced with the unique situation that this class of psychoactive agents is referred to with two basic names for its effects on the mind: empathogens and entactogens. Empathogen usually refers to the prosocial, empathetic, and openness properties of MDMA, while entactogen usually refers to the introspective and...
This article proposes a model of comparative mysticism that bases its rationale for comparison in the dynamic interaction between three components: neurocognitive mechanisms and substrates, phenomenal experiences, and noetic accounts. In examining the phenomenon of ego - dissolution ( EDn ), using this model, a scholar can identify universal and contextual components of a mystic’s experiences....
It has been proposed that there is a wave excitation in animal brains, whose function is to represent three-dimensional space around the animal as a working spatial memory. After surveying the evidence supporting the hypothesis, I discuss ways in which it can be tested. There are many ways to investigate it, theoretically and experimentally. They include connectome studies, computational...