The psychopathology of schizophrenia is a complex amalgamation of features that span across different dimensions. These dimensions range from the experience of altered time and space through self-disorders to perceptual, positive, and negative symptoms. The relationship between these different psychopathological dimensions remains unclear. Addressing this gap was the aim of our study. We...
The science of consciousness has been successful over the last decades. Yet, it seems that some of the key questions remain unanswered. Perhaps, as a science of consciousness, we cannot move forward using the same theoretical commitments that brought us here. It might be necessary to revise some assumptions we have made along the way. In this piece, I offer no answers, but I will question some...
Consciousness is traditionally viewed as a by-product of neurophysiological processes. This work proposes an alternative hypothesis: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain, but a manifestation of a universal spiritual field — the soul of the Universe. The study integrates concepts from quantum physics, information theory, phenomenology, and transpersonal psychology to offer a...
The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) has long served as a paradigm for understanding multisensory integration and body ownership. Traditional interpretations emphasize neural mechanisms and cognitive suggestibility, but they fall short of identifying the illusion’s fundamental cause. This paper proposes the Soul-Drift Hypothesis (SDH), a novel conceptual framework that attributes the RHI not to...
The study of animal consciousness has gained new prominence, driven by progress in neuroscience, cognitive ethology, and philosophy of mind (e.g., Andrews et al., 2024;Ehret and Romand, 2022;Bayne et al., 2024;Grinde, 2024). This special issue brings together diverse contributions (i.e., empirical, theoretical, and conceptual) that propose new ways to think about the nature and evolution of...
Abstract Spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as dreaming and mind wandering, form a significant part of our conscious mental lives. Yet, the precise phenomenological and content-related similarities and differences between dreaming and waking mind wandering remain insufficiently understood. In this study, we address this gap by comparing 340 dreaming and mind wandering questionnaire...
Psychedelic compounds are emerging treatments for depression, capable of producing rapid and lasting symptom reduction after 1-2 administrations in the context of psychotherapy - a stark contrast to traditional antidepressants. Despite promising outcomes, the mechanisms underlying psychedelics' reported antidepressant effects remain poorly understood and are often framed in fragmented ways....
Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access consciousness, the global availability of information for reasoning. Yet the bandwidth of access consciousness is tiny compared with the richness of `raw experience', so...
Happiness is a subjective experience that can serve as the ultimate goal for humans. A recent study that employed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reported that spontaneous fluctuation (fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation: fALFF) in the precuneus is negatively associated with subjective happiness. However, little is known about the neural electrical...
How consciousness arises from brain activity has been a topic of intense scientific research for decades. But how does one identify the neural basis of something that is intrinsically personal and subjective? A hallmark approach has been to ask human observers to judge stimuli as 'seen' (conscious) and 'unseen' (unconscious) and use post hoc sorting of neural measurements based these judgments....