Abstract Job burnout is a serious problem in medicine, leading to lost productivity, costly attrition, loss of well-being, and even loss of life through suicide. A major US medical school introduced a 2-credit elective course that featured the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique to try to address this problem. This chapter reports on an 8-year study of medical students’ experiences with...
The discussions on conceptualization, operationalization, measures, and means of well-being (WB) and personal excellence (PE) are dynamic and debatable. Therefore, this study aims to coin a perspective of PE based on the Patanjali Yoga Sūtra (PYS). For this, professional, psychological, philosophical, and yogic perspectives of WB and PE are analyzed to derive a viable yogic framework for PE....
Mental imagery is a process by which thoughts become experienced with sensory characteristics. Yet, it is not clear why mental images appear diminished compared to veridical images, nor how mental images are phenomenologically distinct from hallucinations, another type of non-veridical sensory experience. Current evidence suggests that imagination and veridical perception share neural...
One notion emerging from studies on unconscious visual processing is that different "blinding techniques" seem to suppress the conscious perception of stimuli at different levels of the neurocognitive architecture. However, even when only the results from a single suppression method are compared, the picture of the scope and limits of unconscious visual processing remains strikingly...
Many attempts have been made to enhance hypnotizability. The most recent studies adopted the non-invasive brain stimulation to deactivate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during hypnosis, indicating this as a promising approach. However, it is still no clear whether individual factors can predict the effects of stimulation on hypnotizability. In the present study we adopted the...
Abstract Merleau-Ponty wrote prolifically throughout his life on psychology, aesthetics, and politics, on pedagogy, physics, and painting. Between his appointment to the Université de Lyon in 1945 and his sudden death in Paris in 1961—a copy of Descartes’Dioptriqueon the desk in front of him—the survey of courses he taught is dizzying in scope. For all its promise, however, the...
Today's quick development of artificial intelligence (AI) brings us to the questions that have until recently been the domain of philosophy or even sciencefiction. When can be a system considered an intelligent one? What is a consciousness and where it comes from? Can systems gain consciousness? It is necessary to have in mind, that although the development seems to be a revolutionary one, the...
The question of the “passage of time,” particularly that of the subjective experience of time’s passage, raises difficult problems from both phenomenal and metaphysical perspectives. This is because it seems that we experience the passage of time in the first person, even though this experience does not correspond to any physical reality. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the phenomenology...
The research aimed to create a groundbreaking neuromodulation method to improve consciousness. Firstly, an innovative rhythmic sound and electric stimulation technique was introduced to modulate consciousness in healthy individuals. Subsequently, this technique was tested on patients with consciousness disorders. The study concluded by examining the impact of this stimulation on brain...
Scientific studies of perception use motoric reports as the principal means of communicating subjective experience. In such experiments, a widely held and implicit assumption is that the motor action conveys but does not tamper with perceptual experience. We tested nine observers on a luminance detection task in a cross-over repeated measures design. In separate conditions, observers reported...