This paper introduces a new construct, the ‘pivotal mental state’, which is defined as a hyper-plastic state aiding rapid and deep learning that can mediate psychological transformation. We believe this new construct bears relevance to a broad range of psychological and psychiatric phenomena. We argue that pivotal mental states serve an important evolutionary function, that is, to aid...
Clark ( Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (3–4), 71–87, 2018 ) worries that predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception introduce a puzzling disconnect between the content of personal-level perceptual states and their underlying subpersonal representations. According to PP, in perception, the brain encodes information about the environment in conditional probability density...
Recently, a movement reviving psychedelic drugs has emerged among physicians, echoed by activists like Michael Pollan, who promoted psychedelics for treating a variety of conditions and for "the betterment of well people" in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Pollan...
Benefiel and Lee assembled this volume to advance a newer thread of conversation in the field of contemplative studies: the attempt to move beyond its privileging of Buddhism and Western science.Their own experience as scholars of Christian spirituality who attended meetings of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education and of the Contemplative Studies Unit of the American...
While the extraordinary pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic on student mental health have received considerable attention, less attention has been placed on the well-being of educators. School system employees play a vital role in society, and teacher levels of well-being are associated with the educational outcomes of young people. We extend extant research on the prevalence and correlates of...
A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and...
Neural complexity and brain entropy (BEN) have gained greater interest in recent years. The dynamics of neural signals and their relations with information processing continue to be investigated through different measures in a variety of noteworthy studies. The BEN of spontaneous neural activity decreases during states of reduced consciousness. This evidence has been showed in primary...
Faith healings, as reported in the faith traditions, take us into a different territory of consciousness. Placebo effects are thought to be a quantum reality and may be responsible for some of the anomalous healings. If spiritual dimensions are brought into the equation, some of the healing miracles may also have spiritual and spiritistic components. Advanced external spiritual agencies may be...
The benefits of loving kindness meditation on generative positive emotions, cultivating connection, and love towards others and oneself is well-documented in literature. Through intentional practices such as mindfulness meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy, people can change how we engage with the world. Cognitive training can even reverse brain aging. Exercise and physical activity can...
This chapter addresses the physicality, the embodied nature of our identity, and our social and other forms of embeddedness that shape our identities. Our sex, body type, relationship with our bodies, body image, race, sexual orientation, gender identification, all of them influence our relationship with our bodies and part of our identity is inextricably tied to our bodies. We call it the...