According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi:10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at...
Aim: The goal of this pilot study was to assess the association between basic self-disturbance (SD) and deficits in neurocognitive and metacognitive functioning among help-seeking adolescents with and without attenuated psychosis syndrome (APS). Methods: Sixty-one non-psychotic, help-seeking adolescents (age 13-18) were assessed with the examination of anomalous self-experience, the structured...
Examination of the fortunes of various Hinduism-inspired new religious movements (such as Rajneeshism and Transcendental Meditation) shows that the most successful were world affirming rather than world rejecting, and that their relative success was bought at the price of becoming patently more secular. Transcendental Meditation’s project to create the core of an alternative society in...
Hamlet walks out alone and delivers the axial meditation of western literature. Soliloquy 4 can be moved without damaging its impact, perhaps because of its lack of first-person viewpoint. John Lee disputes whether Shakespeare’s great achievement is the creation of interiority: The limited lexicon of Elizabethans precludes the depiction of selfhood modern psychology achieves—that Hamlet’s...
What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made...
Immersing ourselves in food images can sometimes make it feel subjectively real, as if the actual food were right in front of us. Excessive self-immersion into mental content, however, is a hallmark of psychological distress, and of several psychiatric conditions. Being aware that imagined events are not necessarily an accurate depiction of reality is a key feature of psychotherapeutic...
With the growing number of older persons with chronic illnesses, the demand for professionals who can provide complex care is increasing as well. However, evidence shows that health professionals’ burnout rate has been consistently increasing for the last 3 decades. In an effort to alleviate some of the issues associated with caregiver burnout, we conducted mind-body training of self-compassion...
Entheogenesis may be both literally and liberally defined as "the creation, or invocation, of the deity, or Deity, within". It is a very ancient quest, and in one way or another, the basis of shamanism, animism, healing, and likely, according to numerous theoretical and scientific works, at the core of religion itself. The anxiety of humankind may be founded in awareness of the impending demise...
PeerJOctober 6, 2017Kok Suen Cheng, Yun Fah Chang, Ray P S Han et al.
Objectives: Practitioners of mindfulness are reported to have greater cognitive control especially in conflict monitoring, response inhibition and sustained attention. However, due to the various existing methods in each mindfulness practices and also, the high commitment factor, a barrier still exists for an individual to pick up the practices. Therefore, the effect of short duration deep...
Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance...