Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism
September 1, 2020
Emily T. Troscianko
Nietzsche’s writing and thought about the mind challenge some of the same Cartesian dichotomies that the more recent frameworks of 4E and distributed cognition do. Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), a highpoint in Nietzsche’s project of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (revaluation of all values), is a proclamation of perspectivism: there is no objective perception and nothing...
Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism
September 1, 2020
Marion Thain
The modernity of late-nineteenth-century visualities has been influentially and persistently located in a disembodiment of the eye. Yet this was a period which saw theorists of aesthetic perception such as Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson developing embodied formulations of vision that put sight and the other senses into intimate dialogue. Starting with Vernon Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’ and...
Cognition
September 2020
Cameron M Doyle, Kurt Gray
Immortality is thought to be achieved through heroic deeds, reincarnation, and the afterlife. The present studies reveal an alternative path to transcending death: dying while conscious. Seven studies demonstrate that dying while more awake, aware and/or lucid leads people to see a richer postmortem mind-an effect we call conservation of consciousness. People see more mind in the deceased when...
Journal of Medical Humanities
September 1, 2020
Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed
17 citations
Spirit possession is a common phenomenon around the world in which a non-corporeal agent is involved with a human host. This manifests in a range of maladies or in displacement of the host's agency and identity. Prompted by engagement with the phenomenon in Egypt, this paper draws connections between spirit possession and the concepts of personhood and intentionality. It employs these concepts...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2020
Yury V M Lages, Daniel C Mograbi, Thomas E Krahe et al.
This review brings to light critical epistemological and theoretical considerations when studying complex emotional states in animals. We discuss anthropomorphic and Umwelt perspectives of nonhuman animals and the ways in which distinct theories of consciousness and neural processing may restrict the potential for the development of knowledge on the topic. Within the same line of argumentation,...
PLoS One
August 31, 2020
Markus A Maier, Vanessa L Buechner, Moritz C. Dechamps et al.
The term "retroactive avoidance" refers to a special class of effects of future stimulus presentations on past behavioral responses. Specifically, it refers to the anticipatory avoidance of aversive stimuli that were unpredictable through random selection after the response. This phenomenon is supposed to challenge the common view of the arrow of time and the direction of causality. Preliminary...
Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature
August 31, 2020
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
While the poets Hölderlin and Rilke are often evoked together in a common thematic context, they have invited little direct comparison in literary scholarship. Yet as demonstrated in this essay, the poetics and poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke are connected by the common notion of distinctly poetic consciousness and by their efforts to figure the relation of poetic consciousness to nature. It is...
Scientific Reports
August 28, 2020
Yanli Lin, Lilianne M. Gloe, Courtney C. Louis et al.
17 citations
Despite a growing literature supporting the salutary effects of mindfulness meditation on emotion regulation, the underlying mechanisms linking neural and subjective changes occurring during the actual practice of meditation with emotion regulatory effects observed after meditation remains virtually unexplored. The current study sought to address this gap in knowledge by testing the hypothesis...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
August 22, 2020
Ramón Guevara, Diego M. Mateos, Jose Luis Perez Velazquez
One of the biggest queries in cognitive sciences is the emergence of consciousness from matter. Modern neurobiological theories of consciousness propose that conscious experience is the result of interactions between large-scale neuronal networks in the brain, traditionally described within the realm of classical physics. Here, we propose a generalized connectionist framework in which the...
Journal of Neuroscience
August 21, 2020
Dian Lyu, Ioannis Pappas, D. K. Menon et al.
preprint
Human brains interpret external stimuli based on internal representations. One untested hypothesis is that the default-mode network (DMN), widely considered responsible for internally oriented cognition, can decode external information. Here, we posit that the unique structural and functional fingerprint of the precuneus (PCu) supports a prominent role for the posterior part of the DMN in this...