Abstract The sense of agency is the experience of predicting, initiating, or controlling actions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the sense of agency that appears in perceptual consciousness. I follow theorists such as Bayne and Prinz in suggesting that the perceptual sense of agency (PSoA) is underpinned by self-monitoring processes. The self-monitoring mechanism compares sensory...
Individuals with schizophrenia have less priors than controls, meaning they rely less upon their prior experiences to interpret the current stimuli. These differences in priors are expected to show as higher alternation rates in bistable perception tasks like the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) paradigm. In this paradigm, continuously moving dots in two dimensions are perceived subjectively as...
Abstract There have been many very promising theories published concerning the generation of consciousness. These theories mostly link the emergence of consciousness to neural activity, but very few attempt to show how that neural activity specifically causes experience to occur. This article explores this problem at the level of individual networks by examining the information changes that...
BMC PsychiatryNovember 3, 2025Ahmet Selim Başaran, Hande Gazey, Sena Çağlayan et al.
BACKGROUND: Politically charged public life supplies powerful symbols that can be recruited into delusional meaning-making. This study examined how political contexts shape the content and experiential structure of delusions in patients with psychotic disorders in Turkey. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective, archive-based qualitative study of inpatient psychiatric records from a tertiary...
Research exploring delusions among individuals with psychosis often focuses on form, rather than content, and on prevalence, rather than change in a cohort over time. While delusional forms are mostly consistent across cultures and historical periods, the content of delusions is shaped by sociopolitical factors. We explored the form and content of delusions in a modern sample of individuals...
Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article maps out key conceptual and methodological issues underlying the study of hallucinations. We begin by unpacking core theoretical issues - how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations, whether they form a single construct or...
This manuscript provides a naturalistic foundation for a Philosophy of Enactive Inference and, on this basis, argues for a multi-perspectival monism. Starting from the thesis that the spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity function as a "common currency" for neuronal and mental processes, the paper develops a multi-layered synthesis of the theories of Northoff, Buonomano, Friston, and...
Why should we be interested in the relationship between dreaming and memory?Dreaming and Memory: Philosophical Issues sets out to explore this issue, offering rigorous and thought-provoking investigations into how these two phenomena might illuminate one another.Bringing together a range of philosophical perspectives, the volume navigates the blurred boundaries of these two cognitive...
An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna. A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946–2000) was the twentieth century’s psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution,...
BMC PsychologySeptember 29, 2025Hajar Behzadi, Mohammad Farzollah Abbasi, Sally Pezaro et al.
Background: Death is an experience that every human being faces. As such, the near-death experience (NDE) has been a topic of interest to humanity for millennia. The NDE is often understood as a subjective event of altered consciousness that can occur during life-threatening events and/or near the time of biological death. This study investigated the near-death lived experiences of coma...