Oxford University Press eBooks
December 23, 2011
Steven Sutcliffe
Abstract The “new age” has been both difficult to specify and tricky to theorize in the standard terms of the academic study of religion. This chapter begins by looking at how elements of the new age stack up with the limited model of a rationalized bureaucratic organization supplied by the “world religions” taxonomy. It further locates the new age in the discursive drift from mysticism to...
December 15, 2011
D. Collard
1 citation
Ritual and religion are increasingly being accorded a central role in the development of complex societies throughout the ancient world, particularly in understanding how social and political authority were established and legitimized (Aldenderfer 1993; Hayden 2003, 347-79; Marcus and Flannery 2004; Schachner 2001; Trigger 2003, 79-91). This relationship is particularly evident in the East...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Miranda Occhionero, Piera Carla Cicogna
Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are complex experiences that include the visual illusory reduplication of one's own body. From a phenomenological point of view, we can distinguish three conditions: autoscopic hallucinations, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences. The dysfunctional pattern involves multisensory disintegration of personal and extrapersonal space perception. The etiology, generally...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Kristian Sandberg, Bo Martin Bibby, Bert Timmermans et al.
When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is often estimated by calculating task performance at the subjective threshold or by calculating the correlation between accuracy and awareness. However, both these methods have certain limitations. In the present article, we propose describing task accuracy and awareness as...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Daniel Collerton, Elaine K. Perry
Comparing the phenomenology, neurochemical pathology, and psychopharmacology of hallucinations and dreaming is limited by the available data. Evidence to date reveals no simple correspondence between the two states. Differences in the phenomenology of visual hallucinations and the visual component of dreams may reflect variations in visual context acting on the same underlying mechanism - the...
December 1, 2011
Steven Samuel
This paper takes a philosophical look at how the views of Gilbert Ryle and Kwasi Wiredu can be used to resolving the mind-body problem located in Rene Descartes’ philosophy. The common sense account of the mind-body theory was first systematically carried out by Descartes. To him, mind and body do not only exist, they also interact. Through his notion of clear and distinct ideas, Descartes...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Martin Desseilles, Thien Thanh Dang‐Vu, Virginie Sterpenich et al.
Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Ivan Limosani, Armando D'Agostino, Maria Laura Manzone et al.
Several independent lines of research in neurobiology seem to support the phenomenologically-grounded view of the dreaming brain/mind as a useful model for psychosis. Hallucinatory phenomena and thought disorders found in psychosis share several peculiarities with dreaming, where internally generated, vivid sensorimotor imagery along with often heightened and incongruous emotion are paired with...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Michael Schredl
Dreaming in patients with schizophrenia was and is of particular interest to researchers and clinicians due to the phenomenological similarities between the dreaming state and schizophrenic daytime symptomatology such as bizarre thoughts or hallucinations. Extensive literature reviews have shown that dream studies in the field of psychopathology often do not fulfill common scientific criteria....
Brain and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Valdas Noreika, Leila Jylhänkangas, Levente Móró et al.
62 citations
Anesthetic-induced changes in the neural activity of the brain have been recently utilized as a research model to investigate the neural mechanisms of phenomenal consciousness. However, the anesthesiologic definition of consciousness as "responsiveness to the environment" seems to sidestep the possibility that an unresponsive individual may have subjective experiences. The aim of the present...