Consciousness science faces the challenge of bridging first-person experience with third-person empirical measurements. Neurophenomenology aims to build such 'generative passages' connecting the content of experience with behavioural and neuroscientific data. However, the mathematical machinery for such bridges remains underdeveloped. Here we develop a Rosetta Stone hypothesis from predictive...
Open Mind2026Sarah Nicole Horne, Anne M. Cleary, Joshua Prasad et al.
Around two decades ago, cognitive psychologists began empirically studying déjà vu—the odd sensation that one is re-experiencing something from the past while being certain of the situation's novelty. Prior work, investigating déjà vu's subjective phenomenology by soliciting retrospective reports in a survey, uncovered déjà vu was relatively positive in its emotionality, and involved language...
The micro-phenomenological interview is a technique for investigating phenomenology in detail during an activity lasting seconds to minutes. Here, we applied it to understanding the moment-to-moment experiences of subjects responding to imaginative suggestions that were aimed at temporarily altering perceived reality through deployment of phenomenological control. Our intention was to generate...
To examine the prevalence and phenomenological manifestations of sleep paralysis among medical students. A total of 499 senior medical students were surveyed. The mean age of the participants was 22.64±2.3 years; 71.34% were female. The Unusual Sleep Experiences Questionnaire (USEQ) was used. Sleep paralysis (SP) is prevalent among medical students. A total of 169 (33.9%) students reported...
Abstract This chapter refers to the “hard problem of consciousness”, as discussed by David Chalmers, and its peculiar difficulties. Following Chalmers’s decade long work on the ontological riddles posed by the mind-body-problem, the chapter concludes Chalmers’s objective to find a naturalist theory of mind and matter might not be as impossible as estimated by Chalmers himself—at least not if we...
Recent advances in psychedelic neuroscience have revitalized scientific inquiry into the biological foundations of consciousness. Large-scale neuroimaging studies have consistently demonstrated that psychedelics increase functional integration across distributed brain networks while weakening the stability of normally dominant neural architectures associated with self referential processing and...
The fields of neurophenomenology, psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology (PNEI) and epigenetics provide innovative and complementary perspectives on understanding the positive effects of art and aesthetic experiences on human well-being and health. Neurophenomenology integrates subjective experiential reports with neuroscientific data, offering valuable insights into how aesthetic experiences elicit...
Biological psychiatry faces a significant epistemic challenge in identifying valid objects for mechanistic research. Both diagnostic constructs and individual symptoms are abstract symbols defined circularly within a closed hermeneutic system, creating a symbol grounding problem that hinders the discovery of biophysical substrates (biomarkers). I argue that progress requires an epistemological...
This article proposes a dual-self states framework in which reflective and experiential modes of consciousness are understood as dynamic configurations along a processing continuum. The reflective/experiential self-state corresponds to narrative, denotational, and self-referential consciousness underpinned by default mode network activity. The experiential self state is characterized as an...
Psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is renowned for inducing highly immersive experiences, often including encounters with seemingly sentient presences. While such phenomena are well documented, immersion under psychedelics remains conceptually underdefined and phenomenologically underexplored. Here we apply micro-phenomenology to characterize immersion under DMT as a structured...
Empathy plays a fundamental role in social bonding and intersubjective understanding. While recent research has emphasized how bodily processes shape empathic engagement and underlie individual differences, the impact of bodily disruptions on empathic experience in Parkinson's disease (PD) remains largely unexplored. In this study, we used a neurophenomenological approach to investigate Empathy...
In the assessment of criminal insanity, delusions play a particularly important role, because they express reality judgments, which, due to their verbalized form, serve well as "evidence" of psychosis. However, psychosis, understood as a fundamentally impaired sense of reality, can also involve disturbances that are neither verbalized nor inferential, but mainly enacted. In this paper, we...
The concept of recognition has recently been introduced into the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly through Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, to discuss the demand for recognition by mental health activists. This paper complements this perspective with a first-person approach, that is, a phenomenological perspective on recognition using the example of psychosocial interventions for psychosis. For...
Delusions frequently involve strong beliefs about, or interactions with, illusory social agents. Although such agents have been systematically described in hallucinations, few studies have investigated their nature and identity in delusions. We identified 205 electronic mental health records describing the content of delusions from the Clinical Record Interactive Search platform at South London...
Hallucinations (HAs), the perceptual experiences that occur without external stimuli, are classically associated with psychiatric disorders, but also occur in the general population. Involuntary mental imagery (IMI), the spontaneous occurrence of visual or auditory mental content, shares several features with HAs. The continuum hypothesis suggests that these phenomena exist on a spectrum...
The self and its disorders in schizophrenia have been studied extensively over recent decades. Much of this literature is grounded in a bipartite understanding of the self, distinguishing the pre-reflective, minimal self from the reflective, narrative self. However, few studies have systematically examined the links between disturbances at these two levels of self. This integrative review...
We outline a research agenda for mutually beneficial artificial consciousness (MBAC): Artificial intelligence (AI) whose own subjective experience is positive and whose behaviour enhances human and non-human flourishing. Our starting point is the notion of beneficial states of consciousness (BSC)–qualitatively valued mind states such as kindness, joy, clarity, and non-duality–which we group...
Whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can possess consciousness is a contentious question because of the inherent challenges of defining and operationalizing subjective experience. This paper proposes a framework to reframe the question of artificial consciousness into empirically tractable tests. We introduce three evaluative criteria – S (subjective-linguistic), L (latent-emergent),...
We developed and validated the Nature of Mind Scale (NOMS), a 24-item measure assessing lay beliefs about eight distinct philosophical positions on the mind-body relationship. Given the limitations of existing measures and the theoretical diversity of mind-body positions, our goal was to develop a comprehensive yet practical scale that could capture the full range of philosophical stances...
Felt presence (FP) is the experience that another entity is present in one's proximal environment, despite no sensory evidence. Occurrence of FP is linked to psychosis risk, but qualities of FP in the context of psychosis are not well understood. We conducted an online, exploratory survey assessing qualities of FP in relation to psychosis risk in the general population. Three hundred and...