Alex Jinich-Diamant
preprint
Psychedelics, contemplative practice, and fasting are physiologically unrelated interventions that nevertheless converge, across cultures and centuries, on a common experiential endpoint: the mystical state. Here I propose that this convergence reflects shared disruption of a single computational architecture, the precision-weighted predictive hierarchy, through three mechanistically distinct...
Yixiao Sun, Zhihao Ma
1 citation
preprint
Building on the Higher-Order Theory of Emotion, this study investigates how self-focused phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness shape emotions. We operationalized these two conscious experiences as agency and meaning in life, respectively. These constructs were extracted from participants’ written texts using two natural language processing techniques: coreference resolution and...
Ágota Vass, Gábor Csukly, Kinga Farkas
16 citations
preprint
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) are diagnostically demarcated disorders, yet overlapping pathological functioning is reported at several levels of organisation starting from brain circuitry to behaviour, complicating diagnostic differentiation. In particular, what the two disorders seem to share is anomalous minimal self experience, which is a trait-like, phenomenological...
Qeios
Milad Olfat
The innovation of Merleau-Ponty is considering the body as existence or ontology. He admitted that a mechanical psychologist could not explain our experience of the body. Thought and body are inseparable. Also, uncertainty, or as Merleau-Ponty says, bouncing, is a feature of true philosophy. Merleau-Ponty knew that he was living in a period in which two forms of absolutism overshadowed...
Anney Roy
The Ganzfeld experiment appears as a uniform and unstructured field that may measure altered states of consciousness. The experiment uses a dim light frequency projected on translucent eye covers combined with a static audio frequency emitted through a pair of headphones. Since altered states and alpha interactions appear in Ganzfeld studies, the hypothesis here states that they may be...
Preprints.org
Enzo Tagliazucchi
2 citations
preprint
Serotonergic psychedelics are known to elicit changes in conscious awareness, including perception of the environment and the self, as well as in mood, emotion and different aspects of cognition (Nichols, 2016). The effect of these compounds is complex and resists a straightforward classification that is useful for other drugs, such as “stimulants” or “sedatives”. While the effects of certain...
Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh
Please note this is a draft on which we are seeking feedback. Substantial changes and a third author are likely be added to the next version. The hard problem of consciousness asks why there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. We address this from 1st principles, by constructing a formalism that unifies lower and higher order theories of consciousness. We assume...
Azenet Liora Lopez Lopez
preprint
Split-brain subjects can consciously perceive and identify two stimuli presented simultaneously but separately in opposite hemifields. Yet, they seem to lack a conscious experience of the two stimuli together, as they cannot judge whether these are the same or different. Such breakdowns in experiential or phenomenal unity would carry important implications for philosophical reflection on the...
Zümrüt Duygu Sen, Nitin Sharma, Lena Vera Danyeli et al.
preprint
Along with its rapid therapeutic benefits, ketamine induces transient experience of dissociation during administration. Given the suggested association between ketamine-induced dissociation and treatment response, understanding the neural correlates of dissociation would help to elucidate its therapeutic mechanism. The posteromedial cortex (PMC) has been reported to play a vital role in the...
Tony R. Montgomery
Understanding how a simple endogenous tryptamine could occasion profound alterations in perception and self-modeling remains a key challenge for neuroscience. We advance the Birth Echo Hypothesis (BEH) : during a narrowly defined perinatal window (≈ −2 to +24 h around delivery), a convergence of hypoxic–hypercapnic stress, maximal sensory novelty, and a poly-neuromodulatory milieu...