June 24, 2009
A. Benedict, L. Mancini, M. Grodin
As a result of the recent resurgence of violence in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights has an increased patient demographic: Tibetan refugee monks. Diagnosed by their amchis (traditional healers) as having a srog-rLung (life-wind) imbalance and presenting with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they struggle with their contemplative...
Educational Media Reviews Online
June 8, 2009
J. Schomberg
Distributed by Filmakers Library, 124 East 40th Street, New York, NY 10016; 202-808-4980Produced by ARTE FranceDirected by Delphine Morel2006, DVD, color, 52 min. This is a fascinating documentary of research done by neuroscientists affiliated with the Mind and Life Institute. The purpose of their research is to examine longtime practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. They use interviews...
Sleep Science
June 1, 2009
C Timo‐Iaria, Angela C. Valle
Dreaming has been a subject of cogitation since remote Antiquity. In ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle discussed about the meaning of dreams, concluding that the prevailing mistic and mythic concepts about them were incorrect. Instead, they thought that dreams were not provoked by spirits, ghosts or gods, which took over the mind to express themselves through dreaming. Aristotle[ 1...
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
June 1, 2009
Gideon Yaffe
It was common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find philosophers holding the position that for something to be ‘in the mind’ and for that mind to be conscious of it are one and the same thing. The thought is that consciousness is a relation between a mind and a mental entity playing the same role as the relation of inherence found between a substance and qualities belonging...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2009
Michael Snodgrass, Natasha Kalaida, E Samuel Winer
28 citations
Access can either be first-order or second-order. First order access concerns whether contents achieve representation in phenomenal consciousness at all; second-order access concerns whether phenomenally conscious contents are selected for metacognitive, higher order processing by reflective consciousness. When the optional and flexible nature of second-order access is kept in mind, there...
Journal of Religion and Health
June 1, 2009
Carl Allen Hammerschlag
7 citations
An American transcultural psychiatrist, and a Mexican engineer deeply involved with the Huichol Indians, build a team that heals a decade-long epidemic caused by sorcery. Huichol children in boarding schools became possessed by demonic witchcraft that transformed them into aggressive animals. Many local shaman had been called in to treat the illness but had been unsuccessful. The team found a...
Emergency Medicine News
June 1, 2009
Leon Gussow
Quick: Name the person who started the psychedelic movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Most people old enough to understand the question or who read Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test would probably name Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy, or perhaps Timothy Leary. But the surprising answer is that the concept of deliberately ingesting plants or chemicals to induce hallucinations was introduced into...
PLoS One
May 28, 2009
Chao‐gan Yan, Dongqiang Liu, Yong He et al.
315 citations
BACKGROUND: Recent functional MRI (fMRI) studies have demonstrated that there is an intrinsically organized default mode network (DMN) in the resting brain, primarily made up of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Several previous studies have found that the DMN is minimally disturbed during different resting-state conditions with limited cognitive...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
May 26, 2009
Kalina Christoff, Alan M Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood et al.
1,832 citations
Although mind wandering occupies a large proportion of our waking life, its neural basis and relation to ongoing behavior remain controversial. We report an fMRI study that used experience sampling to provide an online measure of mind wandering during a concurrent task. Analyses focused on the interval of time immediately preceding experience sampling probes demonstrate activation of default...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
May 19, 2009
Stan Franklin, Sidney K. D’Mello, Bernard J. Baars et al.
22 citations
The currently leading cognitive theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988, 2003), postulates that the primary functions of consciousness include a global broadcast serving to recruit internal resources with which to deal with the current situation and to modulate several types of learning. In addition, conscious experiences present current conditions and problems to a “self ”...