Psychedelics have re-emerged as promising treatments for mood disorders. The current model provides a moderate-to-high dose of a psychedelic agent (e.g., psilocybin) to reliably induce an altered state of consciousness. Unfortunately, the hallucinatory effects limit the treatment's potential scalability given patients' vulnerability and extensive monitoring costs, leading to growing interest in...
seeks to explore classic debates in consciousness science, such as distinguishing between the most promising contemporary theories of consciousness, while also offering fresh perspectives and new insights into the progress of this field, including current reflections on its connection to artificial intelligence. One of the most debated issues in consciousness research concerns its neural...
Veit (2023) provides a framework for modelling and empirically investigating varieties of consciousness as a Darwinian phenomenon, based on abduction from life histories of animals. The alleged ‘hard problem’ is exposed as an artefact of ignoring mechanisms by which increasingly complex varieties of consciousness evolved under selection pressure over evolutionary time. I illustrate Veit’s...
People with fantasy proneness and dispositions towards absorption and hypnotizability encounter waking thoughts that are particularly bizarre or dreamlike in nature. This suggests not only a continuity between dreaming and waking thoughts—what we refer to as continuity of thought—but perhaps stable individual differences in continuity of thought. The personality trait transliminality, which has...
Current BiologyMay 5, 2025Pavlos I Topalidis, Gianpaolo Demarchi, Lisa Reisinger et al.1 citation
Imagine listening to a familiar song on the radio. As the melody unfolds, you often anticipate the following note or beat before it plays. This ability reflects the brain's capacity to extract statistical regularities from sensory input and predict future sensory events. It is considered automatic, requiring little to no conscious effort or attention.1,2,3,4,5 But to what extent is this...
Brain InjuryMay 5, 2025Vibeke Wagner, Jakob Rud Sørensen, Christina Kruuse et al.3 citations
Early out-of-bed mobilization is recommended for individuals with severe acquired brain injury and impaired consciousness to promote recovery. Robot-assisted gait training (RAGT) utilizes robotic assistance to facilitate neuroplastic changes through repetitive training and feedback. We aimed to map the evidence of RAGT in non-ambulatory individuals with impaired consciousness or cognitive...
The recent resurgence of classical psychedelic compounds, specifically 5-HT2A receptor agonists, as potential therapeutics has led to numerous initiatives aimed at better understanding the mechanisms underlying their effects. Psychedelic compounds are commonly known as hallucinogens. One of the major outstanding questions in the field is whether altered states of consciousness-the...
Contemporary wellness seekers utilize the various practices of yoga to promote well-being. As a mind-body intervention, yogic approaches to physical postures, breathing practices, and meditation have enriched the quality of secular and sacred living. However, apart from these practices in ancient India, its theological orientation has introduced a transcendental experience of Shabdha Brahman...
Research into traumatic memory has focused heavily upon re-experiencing symptoms (e.g. flashbacks). Features predominantly associated with complex trauma, such as gaps in the recollection of traumatic events, remain comparatively underexplored. In this article, I draw on the testimonies of survivors of complex trauma who participated in a survey informed by Phenomenologically Grounded...
Corvids have long been a target of public fascination and of scientific attention, particularly in the study of animal minds. Using Birch et al.'s (2020) 5-dimensional framework for animal consciousness we ask what it is like to be a corvid and propose a speculative but empirically informed answer. We go on to suggest future directions for research on corvid consciousness and how it can inform...