PsyArXivNovember 9, 2022Yingtao Fu, Mei Zhou, Jifan Zhou et al.
preprint
One central question in the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness is regarding the scope of human consciousness. There remains lively debate whether high-level information integration is necessarily dependent on consciousness, or it could occur beyond the scope of consciousness. The current study discovered a novel type of unconscious high-level integration based on social...
Although conscious perception is a fundamental cognitive function, its neural correlates remain unclear. It remains debatable whether thalamocortical interactions play a decisive role in conscious perception. To clarify this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) where flickering red and green visual cues could be perceived either as a non-fused colour or fused colour. Here we...
PharmaceuticalsNovember 9, 2022Sabrina de Carvalho Cartágenes, Cinthia Cristina Sousa de Menezes Da Silveira, Bruno Gonçalves Pinheiro et al.
Ketamine, also called 'K-powder' by abusers, an analog of phencyclidine, primarily acts as an antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors, therapeutically used as an anesthetic agent. Ketamine also stimulates the limbic system, inducing hallucinations and dissociative effects. At sub-anesthetic doses, ketamine also displays hallucinatory and dissociative properties, but not loss of...
Virtual environments are emerging as a tool for providing psychede-lic experiences due to the increasing interest in altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and the spread of VR headsets. However, the user experience of commercial psychedelic VR applications has not yet been adequately explored in HCI. To fill this gap, we conducted a user experience study of Cosmic Flow, one of the psychedelic...
PhronimonNovember 3, 2022A. Verhoef, Zander Janse van Rensburg
In this article, we indicate some examples of the possible contemporary return of the mind-body dualism. Aspects of contemporary culture, like the influence of brain-computer interface (BCI) or brain-machine interface (BMI), neuroscience projects, and the popularity of sci-fi series and movies that visualise the separation of consciousness from our bodies, are discussed. Only a few of these...
Typical consciousness can be defined as an individual-specific stream of experiences. Modern consciousness research on dynamic functional connectivity uses clustering techniques to create common bases on which to compare different individuals. We propose an alternative approach by combining modern theories of consciousness and insights arising from phenomenology and dynamical systems theory....
The neural mechanisms through which individuals lose sensory awareness of their environment during anesthesia remains poorly understood despite being of vital importance to the field. Prior research has not distinguished between sensory awareness of the environment (connectedness) and consciousness itself. In the current study, we investigated the neural correlates of sensory awareness by...
This article aims to explore contemplative (pray or meditation) practitioners’ direct lived experiences of enlightenment and develop a multi-item scale measuring these experiences. A mixed-method approach was adopted. The first study is a phenomenological study that interviewed 24 participants with enlightenment experiences and the second study is a scale-development study that recruited 1130...
Proponents of the higher‐order (HO) theory of consciousness (e.g., Lau and Rosenthal) have recently appealed to brain lesion evidence to support their thesis that mental states are conscious when and only when represented by other mental states. This article argues that this evidence fails to support HO theory, doing this by first determining what kinds of conscious deficit should result when...
Ketamine anesthesia increased glucose metabolism in most brain regions compared to another intravenous anesthetic propofol. However, whether the changes in cerebral metabolic networks induced by ketamine share the same mechanism with propofol remains to be explored. The purpose of the present study was to identify specific features of metabolic network in rat brains during ketamine-induced...