Open Mind2026Oakley Charlotte Author, MacKenzie Matthew Advisor, Kasser Jeff Committee Member et al.
There has been a recent resurgence of both cultural and scientific interest in altered states of consciousness. Among the most puzzling and widely reported are mystical experiences—anomalous events where one’s ordinary sense of self is replaced by an overwhelming and transcendent feeling of connectedness or unity. These ‘unitive’ mystical experiences challenge many of our common intuitions...
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a transient sleep-wake phenomenon characterised by conscious awareness accompanied by temporary muscle atonia and, often, vivid multisensory hallucinations. Although SP is widely recognised within sleep science and estimated to affect a substantial number of individuals globally, little is known about its prevalence and phenomenology within Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ),...
Doyon’s book aims to demonstrate that perceptual experience is oriented by norms of coherence and optimality, and that it is in virtue of this orientation that perceptions count as perceptions in the first place. Doyon contends that these norms should not be understood merely as epistemic norms but instead as sui generis, belonging to the internal structure of perceptual experience itself and...
This research-creation study introduces and contextualizes the three-act audio artifact Anamnesis: Pre-Existence, offering an autoethnographic and phenomenological investigation into the threshold between pre-linguistic states of consciousness and the symbolic, name-driven reality of post-natal existence. Grounded in Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Chion’s acousmatic...
This paper introduces phenomenology as a mode of thinking grounded in appearance and experience, focusing on Husserl’s foundational ideas and their broader philosophical implications. The phenomenological framework is built upon intentionality and constitution. Intentionality is the structured relation where diverse experiences converge to form a coherent appearance. Constitution describes how...
AbstractPsychedelics often produce a rich, intricate, and dynamic experience that is challenging to capture effectively. This chapter explores the essential phenomenological features of psychedelic experiences, emphasizing elements with potential implications for religious practices. I will start by highlighting the key aspects of mystical experiences commonly associated with psychedelic use....
Consciousness science faces the challenge of bridging first-person experience with third-person empirical measurements. Neurophenomenology aims to build such 'generative passages' connecting the content of experience with behavioural and neuroscientific data. However, the mathematical machinery for such bridges remains underdeveloped. Here we develop a Rosetta Stone hypothesis from predictive...
Open Mind2026Sarah Nicole Horne, Anne M. Cleary, Joshua Prasad et al.
Around two decades ago, cognitive psychologists began empirically studying déjà vu—the odd sensation that one is re-experiencing something from the past while being certain of the situation's novelty. Prior work, investigating déjà vu's subjective phenomenology by soliciting retrospective reports in a survey, uncovered déjà vu was relatively positive in its emotionality, and involved language...
To examine the prevalence and phenomenological manifestations of sleep paralysis among medical students. A total of 499 senior medical students were surveyed. The mean age of the participants was 22.64±2.3 years; 71.34% were female. The Unusual Sleep Experiences Questionnaire (USEQ) was used. Sleep paralysis (SP) is prevalent among medical students. A total of 169 (33.9%) students reported...
Abstract This chapter refers to the “hard problem of consciousness”, as discussed by David Chalmers, and its peculiar difficulties. Following Chalmers’s decade long work on the ontological riddles posed by the mind-body-problem, the chapter concludes Chalmers’s objective to find a naturalist theory of mind and matter might not be as impossible as estimated by Chalmers himself—at least not if we...