Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
February 16, 2016
Catherine E. Kerr, Uday Agrawal, Sandeep Manel Nayak
14 citations
Tai Chi (TC) is a slow-motion contemplative exercise that is associated with improvements in sensorimotor measures, including decreased force variability, enhanced tactile acuity, and improved proprioception, especially in elderly populations. Here, we carried out two studies evaluating the effect of TC practice on measures associated with sensorimotor processing. In study 1, we evaluated TC's...
February 12, 2016
A. Fingelkurts, Tarja Kallio-Tamminen
Based on the finding in novices that four months of meditation training significantly increases frontal default mode network (DMN) module/subnet synchrony while decreasing left and right posterior DMN modules synchrony, the current study tested the prediction whether experienced meditators (those who are practising meditation intensively for several years) had a change in the DMN “trinity” of...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
February 3, 2016
Anatolia Salone, Alessandra Di Giacinto, Carlo Lai et al.
Over the past 20 years, the advent of advanced techniques has significantly enhanced our knowledge on the brain. Yet, our understanding of the physiological and pathological functioning of the mind is still far from being exhaustive. Both the localizationist and the reductionist neuroscientific approaches to psychiatric disorders have proven to be largely unsatisfactory and are outdated....
Journal of medical biography
February 1, 2016
Robert M. Kaplan
9 citations
This article describes the life and work of the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond who pursued a radical path as a psychiatrist while he remained within the establishment. To the public mind however, he is best known as the man who introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline and coined the iconic word psychedelic. From an early stage of his career, Henry Osmond embraced new ideas to break the nexus in...
Medical Hypotheses
February 1, 2016
Thomas S. Ray
6 citations
The drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, produces a specific and distinct open hearted mental state, which led to the creation of a new pharmacological class, "entactogens". Extensive literature on its mechanisms of action has come to characterize MDMA as a "messy" drug with multiple mechanisms, but the consensus is that the distinctive entactogenic effects arise from the release of...
January 27, 2016
P. Goff
In the recent metaphysics literature, a number of philosophers have independently endeavoured to marry sparse ontology to abundant truth. The aim is to keep ontological commitments minimal, whilst allowing true sentences to quantify over a vastly greater range of entities than those which they are ontologically committed to. For example, an ontological commitment only to concrete, microscopic...
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies
January 27, 2016
Celia E.T. Kourie
10 citations
Given the plethora of research conducted in the field of spirituality and mysticism over the last 30 years, it is almost a superhuman feat to keep up with the explosion of information. Of necessity, in a limited article of this nature, it is possible to discuss only a few salient aspects of the spirituality and mysticism phenomenon and by so doing contribute to ongoing research in this...
Choice Reviews Online
January 20, 2016
121 citations
Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity...
January 6, 2016
Scot D. Forshaw
The question of how our perceived reality is constructed and subsequently how our mind has evolved such that we are able to both perceive and subsequently alter our own causality or even our own evolution within this reality has been a long running open question. Referred to as “The Hard Problem”. There have been many theoretical interpretations on the nature of causal self-observance –...
Comparative and Continental Philosophy
January 2, 2016
David Storey
In this essay, I detail the mainsprings of Evan Thompson's creative synthesis of Indian philosophy, Western phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience—what he calls “contemplative neuroscience”—and sketch some of his key arguments. I focus on his method of “neurophenomenology” and the connections among his understanding of three key concepts: consciousness, dreaming, and the link...