A purported key mechanism of action in most mind–body movement approaches is the maturation and development of bodily awareness. This is an experiential learning process with its own phenomenology, underlying neurological processes, and challenges for scientific study. This report focuses on the assessment of changes in bodily awareness, which is of key importance for the documentation of this...
Neurophysiological correlates of self-awareness during sleep ('lucid dreaming') remain unclear despite their importance for clarifying the neural underpinnings of consciousness. Transcranial direct (tDC) and alternating (tAC) current stimulation during sleep have been shown to increase dream self-awareness, but these studies' methodological weaknesses prompted us to undertake additional study....
Despite a high prevalence and broad interest in flying dreams, these exceptional experiences remain infrequent. Our study aimed to (1) induce flying dreams using a custom-built virtual reality (VR) flying task, (2) examine their phenomenological correlates and (3) investigate their relations to participant state and trait factors. 137 participants underwent VR-flying followed by a morning nap....
This work highlights the physics and metaphysics of the universe (multiverse) according to Paul C. Mocombe's theory of phenomenological structuralism.The author posits that phenomenological structuralism offers an emergent metaphysical materialist account regarding the formation and perpetuation of the multiverse, consciousness, and society.
The reliability of introspective or first‐person reports has often been questioned. Micro‐phenomenology is a method that has been devised to increase the reliability of such reports. One way of showing that the method actually increases reliability is to test it in experiments where reporting can be checked by an external observer. Though such approaches are highly valuable, the problem remains...
In this regard, even if the neurobiological functioning of the brain is different from the symbolic processing of a computer (Varela et al. , 1991), it might be relevant to conceptualize psychological activity as a Turing machine. For example, Dehaene (2014) assumes that this type of machine offers “a fairly reasonable model of the operations that our brain is capable of performing under the...
Few practitioners or researchers in psychology would think of the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, as the founding father of their discipline. Yet, it is difficult to see how psychology could have emerged as a discipline in its own right without the contributions of Descartes. Descartes’ theoretical and experimental contributions to our understanding of rationality,...
Studies in the psychology and phenomenology of religious experience have long acknowledged similarities with various forms of psychopathology. Consequently, it has been important for religious practitioners and mental health professionals to establish criteria by which religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences can be differentiated from psychopathological experiences. Many previous attempts...
Neural circuit structure studies commonly focus on cell connectivity within circuits and not on the 3-D structure of the circuit itself. In part, this is due to the difficulty of identifying the three-dimensional structure of circuits containing hundreds to thousands of cells. However, given the importance of structurefunction relationships in biology, this approach may be missing valuable...
Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which...