The nature of consciousness is considered one of science's most perplexing and persistent mysteries. We all know the subjective experience of consciousness, but where does it arise? What is its purpose? What are its full capacities? The assumption within today's neuroscience is that all aspects of consciousness arise solely from interactions among neurons in the brain. However, the origin and...
Evidence suggests continuity between cognition in waking and sleeping states. However, one type of cognition that may differ is episodic thoughts of the past and future. The current study investigated this across waking, NREM sleep and REM sleep. We analyzed thought reports obtained from a large sample of individuals (N = 138) who underwent experience-sampling during wakefulness as well as...
Aberrant salience (AS) is an anomalous world experience which plays a major role in psychotic proneness. In the general population, a deployment of this construct - encompassing personality traits, psychotic-like symptoms, and cannabis use - could prove useful to outline the relative importance of these factors. For this purpose, 106 postgraduate university students filled the AS Inventory...
The cognitive capacities and behavioural repertoire of octopuses have led to speculation that these animals may possess consciousness. However, the nervous system of octopuses is radically different from those typically associated with conscious experience: rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable...
The aim of this study was to compare meditators and non-meditators in terms of their tendency to have peak experiences and their dream lucidity, while examining the associations between these outcomes and some related variables such as non-dual awareness, mindfulness facets and absorption. In this cross-sectional study, 237 participants from general Spanish population completed an online survey...
In the field of consciousness science, there is a tradition to categorize certain states such as slow-wave non-REM sleep and deep general anesthesia as "unconscious". While this categorization seems reasonable at first glance, careful investigations have revealed that it is not so simple. Given that (1) behavioral signs of (un-)consciousness can be unreliable, (2) subjective reports of...
Many people have dreams nightly and some maintain consciousness during dreams. Such dreams are referred to as lucid dreams (LD). During dreams, our speech correlates with facial muscle activity, which is hard to decode, but LD could solve this problem. The primary hypothesis of this study was that the facial muscles electric activity during LD corresponds to specific sounds. Understanding this...
Positive Psychology has turned its attention to the study of emotions in a scientific and rigorous way. Particularly, to how emotions influence people's health, performance, or their overall life satisfaction. Within this trend, Flow theory has established a theoretical framework that helps to promote the Flow experience. Flow state, or optimal experience, is a mental state of high...
Substance-induced consciousness alterations (CA) have mainly been studied among users of psychedelics but not among people using street drugs. Explore occurrences of three different types of substance-induced CA [ego dissolution (ED), visual pseudo-hallucinations (VPH), anxiety/paranoia (A/P)] and their perceived influences on life, together with their associations with substance use and...
In a recent electroencephalography (EEG) sleep study inspired by complexity theories of consciousness, we found that multi-channel signal diversity progressively decreased from wakefulness to slow wave sleep, but failed to find any significant difference between dreaming and non-dreaming awakenings within the same sleep stage (NREM2). However, we did find that multi-channel Lempel-Ziv...