The embodied-grounded view of cognition and language holds that sensorimotor experiences in the form of 're-enactments' or 'simulations' are significant to the individual's development of concepts and competent language use. However, a typical objection to the explanatory force of this view is that, in everyday life, we engage in linguistic exchanges about much more than might be directly...
Background: Mindfulness, giving our full attention to what we are doing in the present moment, is perhaps best understood as training for the brain. When we are mindful, we are actively engaged with our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of “mindful evaluation” as a way to cultivate our reflexivity and self-awareness to improve...
Zen is a way of understanding our true self as human before any concept is produced by the thinking mind. This true self can be perceived, when we let go all of forms of concepts and abstractions, and move to the realm of intuition. In this sense, intuition is direct experience of reality without the mediation of any kind of concepts or abstractions. The Zen tradition offers two ways to help...
Theorists and researchers in the psychology of religion have often focused on the mind as the locus of religion. In this article, we suggest an embodied cognition perspective as a new dimension in studies of religion as a complement to previous research and theorizing. In contrast to the Cartesian view of the mind operating distinctly from the body, an embodied cognition framework posits...
The article elucidates three important concepts and realities that refer to cognitive phenomena and are often (mistakenly) used as synonyms: consciousness (slo. zavest), mind (slo. um), and spirit (slo. duh). They present three levels of human cognition: individual-experiential, individual-mental, and trans-individual-mental. Simply put: the concept of consciousness pertains to the waking...
October 28, 2015Thulani Pattiyakumbura, Suneth Agampodi, Thilini Agampodi et al.
Background There is evidence to suggest that physical activity during pregnancy may have many benefits to the pregnant mother and infant, both during the pre- and postnatal periods. Our program aims to eventually incorporate mindful movement into antenatal clinics in Sri Lanka to promote physical and mental well-being. Methods We conducted a pilot feasibility study to provide training in...
An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges's essays and poems.Borges's paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley.As a reader of Borges's fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal...
Chronic pain exerts an enormous impact on the quality of life of the more than 1 billion people around the globe who are living with this condition [1,2] (IOM, IASP). The economic burden of chronic pain is astounding, and in the United States alone costs over half a trillion dollars annually [1]. Given the costs to humanity there exists a critical need to develop and disseminate interventions...
The differences between SoS theory and quantum consciousness ones imply that it should be possible to make predictions of phenomena allowable in SoS theory but forbidden in all quantum consciousness ones, which isn&s;t necessarily an easy task given Richard Feynman&s;s dictum that &s;anything not forbidden in quantum theory is compulsory&s;. One of the SoS claims is that there is likely to be...
Background Mediumship can be defined as the alleged ability to communicate with deceased persons. The last decade has been particularly productive for this field of research and the study of mediumship can help the understanding of the human mind-brain relationship and provide objective data to the scientific community and to the general population. Objective The aim of this review is to...