Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1997
Thomas Natsoulas
According to William James, bodily self-awareness (bodily feeling) is pervasive throughout the stream of consciousness; such awareness is included in each and every pulse of mentality that makes up the stream of consciousness. This installment of the present series of articles begins to consider the role that bodily self-awareness plays in the very structure of the basic durational components...
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1997
E. Richard Sorenson
As was seen in paper IV of this series (Anthropology of Consciousness 7[4]: 9‐30), basic consciousness can differ strikingly across eras. The type detailed there belongs to a preconquest era that survives today only in isolated enclaves that have not yet been absorbed within the thrall of conquering cultures. There are very few still left. Significantly they are widely distributed across the...
Sleep
February 1997
Lynne Mason, Charles N. Alexander, F T Travis et al.
Standard ambulatory night sleep electroencephalograph (EEG) of 11 long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program reporting "higher states of consciousness" during sleep (the experimental group) was compared to that of nine short-term practitioners and 11 non-practitioners. EEG tracings during stages 3 and 4 sleep showed the experimental group to have: 1) theta-alpha...
The American Journal of Psychology
1997
T Natsoulas
Of the states that constitute William James's stream of consciousness, many are or include perceptual mental acts. These states present to consciousness one or more of their environmental objects themselves, as distinct from a mere internal representation of the latter. That is, a feature of the contents of such states is that their objects have phenomenological perceptual presence....
Journal of Near-Death Studies
1997
Mishka Jambor
2 citations
Article reviewing Christopher Bache's perinatal account of near-death experiences (NDEs) and suggesting that it does not go far enough. The author then presents a new model, bliss/abyss, derived from the study of mysticism; shows that pleasant and frightening NDEs can be accommodated within the model; and discusses the predictions that can be drawn from the new theoretical framework.
Psychopathology
1997
Nimrod Grisaru, Danny Budowski, Eliezer Witztum
The article describes a cultural pattern related to altered states of consciousness, observed amongst new immigrants from Ethiopia to Israel. The belief in possession by Zar spirits is one of the most common possession phenomena in Africa and in other continents. Possession by Zar is expressed by a wide range of behaviors, such as involuntary movements, mutism and incomprehensible language....
Journal of Near-Death Studies
1997
James E. Whinnery
60 citations
Although loss and recovery of consciousness are integral parts of the near-death experience (NDE), the role of altered states of conscious ness in the NDE has not been thoroughly investigated. Sixteen years of ob servations, including nearly 1000 acceleration (+Gz)-induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC) episodes, have revealed a pattern of psychophysiologic symptoms that collectively constitute...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 1996
Morris Moscovitch
Abstract: Why is consciousness associated with recovery of memories that are initially dependent on the hippocampal system? A hypothesis is proposed that the medial temporal lobe/hippocampal complex (MTL/H) receives as its input only information that is consciously apprehended. By a process termed “cohesion,” the MTL/H binds into a memory trace those neural elements that mediated the conscious...
Shofar
December 1, 1996
Mark Verman
2 citations
Kabbalah Refracted: Review Essay KABBALAH REFRACTED Review Essay by MarkVerman Depanment of Religion Carleton College 123 Through a SpeculumThat Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, by ElliotWolfson. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994. 452 pp. Elliot Wolfson is arguably the country's premier scholar of Jewish mysticism. Through a Speculum That Shines (hencefonh...
November 21, 1996
Michael Della Rocca
Abstract This first extensive study of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher’s thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind’s relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza’s positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of...