Stanislav Grof describes the meaning of Holotropic states of conscience, the “states moving toward wholeness”, such as that kind of states which “traditional” psychology and psychiatry normally call altered.
Ayurveda is one of the oldest scientific medical systems in the world, with a long record of clinical experience.Ayurveda indicates the science by which life in its totality is understood.It is a way of life that describes the diet, medicine and behaviour that are beneficial or harmful for life.Ayurvedic approach to health care is based on their basic concepts like -Panchamahabhuta (the five...
Ketamine therapy with culturally attuned trauma-informed psychotherapy in a collaborative cross-cultural partnership may provide a critical step in the operationalization and optimization of treatment effectiveness in diverse populations and may provide a foundation for an improved quality of life for Indigenous people. Decolonizing Indigenous health and wellbeing is long overdue, requiring an...
To understand the role of trait mindfulness acting-with-awareness in the relationship between inhibitory control and ADHD symptom burden. We conducted a cross-sectional study with 103 adults, aged 18 to 86, mean age = 46, mean education = 15 years, 46% male. Participants were recruited in North Western Oregon counties. Eligible individuals were aged >18, fluent in English, and with normal...
English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this...
The philosophical study of the mind and spirit is based on the fact that it is a specific spiritual form of being. Therefore, in philosophy, the category of consciousness is closely related to the analysis and understanding of all material and spiritual activities of man.
Attention Schema Theory (AST) is a recent proposal to provide a scientific explanation for the basis of subjective awareness. In AST, the brain constructs a representation of attention taking place in its own (and others') mind ('the attention schema'). Moreover, this representation is incomplete for efficiency reasons. This inherent incompleteness of the attention schema results in the...
The human brain has the astonishing capacity of integrating streams of sensory information from the environment and forming predictions about future events in an automatic way. Despite being initially developed for visual processing, the bulk of predictive coding research has subsequently focused on auditory processing, with the famous mismatch negativity signal as possibly the most studied...
The theoretical framework of active inference proposed by Karl Friston is currently one of the more actively developed research areas in neuroscience. According to this theory the brain adapts its synaptic activity and architecture in such a way that it de facto comes to mirror the causal structure of events that the organism both encounters and actively induces in its environment. In this...
Strands of thought in the philosophy of mind offer another way of looking at the nature of mental illness and how it arises from intense emotional states. Analysing the phenomenon of wonder is suggested as a novel approach to explaining delusions and variations in insight.