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December 2, 2026 Joe Gough
Abstract: The concept of mind and the category of the mental are hugely influential. They are also fundamentally mistaken. They are ill-suited to describing human beings and our place in the world. They are recent, culturally specific, theoretically motivated, and value-laden. They mislead us about ourselves, nonhumans, the nature of psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, the nature of...
Anthropology and Humanism December 1, 2026 Tanzeen R. Doha
Abstract: This meditation shows the difficulty of reading a dream in the aftermath of a riot. The text moves through fragmentary images at various points of rupture to illuminate traditions of sorrow, grief, and angst in Islam. The postscript encourages writing from the unseen to suspend the narrative arc of secular history itself.
Bodea Marius preprint
Abstract The question of whether artificial systems can become conscious has long been trapped between philosophical claims and engineering denials. Recent advances in large language models have intensified this debate, but progress requires moving beyond either credulity or dismissal toward testable architectural hypotheses. This study begins with an unexpected provocation, a self-described AI...
Stephanie J. Tepper
Research on flow, a positive emotional experience characterized by full absorption, involvement, and enjoyment during an activity, has primarily focused on the individual benefits of this mental state. In the present study, I investigate the mechanisms by which flow may produce changes in social orientation such that the boundaries between the self and other are diminished. In a 2x2 study,...
Steve Haberlin, Satyam Tiwari, Shiva Jahani preprint
Abstract This pilot study examined whether prompting large language models (LLMs) with contemplative principles from three wisdom traditions — Buddhist (mindfulness, emptiness, non-duality, boundless care), Vedic (dharma, ahimsa, viveka), and classical Yogic (yamas and niyamas) — altered the safety, alignment, and cooperative quality of outputs relative to a non-contemplative baseline....
Tom Murray, Thomas McConkie, Matthew D. Sacchet preprint
Adult developmental theory has the potential to contribute across many fields. This paper, authored by two developmentalists and a neuroscientist studying meditators, argues that developmental models are increasingly needed as contemplative science enters a “third wave” concerned with advanced meditation including highly skilled practitioners, deep meditative states, and enduring...
Soumyajit Karmakar
Reduced spontaneous thought during meditation is often described phenomenologically, but a mechanistic account should specify how a dynamical system can enter and persist in such a regime. Here we formulate a minimal statistical-mechanical model in which a dimensionless coordinate, q, represents a coarse-grained propensity for spontaneous-thought activity, and a slowly relaxing variable, r of...
Hong-Viet Victor Ngo, Henrik Oster, Christina Andreou et al. preprint
Circadian rhythms are imprinted in all organisms and influence virtually all aspects of physiology and behaviour in adaptation to the 24-hour day-night cycle. This recognition of a circadian timekeeping system permeating essentially all healthy functioning of body and mind quickly leads to the realisation that, in turn, human ailments should be probed for the degree to which they are rooted in...
Vidushani Dhanawansa, Devon Stoliker, Leonardo Novelli et al.
Background: Psilocybin is a serotonergic psychedelic that provides a pharmacological tool for examining neural activity associated with altered states of consciousness. Existing studies report reduced power (4-30 Hz) in posterior regions and altered functional connectivity (FC) at rest, but have typically involved small samples and coarse anatomical parcellations. Additionally, perceptual...
Jakub Schimmelpfennig, Ewa Tużnik, Anna Duszyk-Bogorodzka et al. preprint
The study examined whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can non-pharmacologically induce psychedelic-like altered states and what predicts their intensity. Fifty-seven adults who had used classic psychedelic within the previous six months completed neutraland psychedelic VR conditions in randomized order. Relative to neutral VR, psychedelic VR elicited higher mystical-type experience...