During binocular rivalry (BR), incongruent, unchanged visual stimulation induces intrinsically generated transitions in conscious content. Due to this astonishing property, BR is commonly combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or single neuron recordings to identify the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs); namely, brain activity reflecting conscious contents and...
Abstract Endorsement of and identification with cultural beliefs about spirit possession can affect clinical presentations and explanatory models associated with sudden, uncontrollable behavior. Although literature shows links between possession-form presentations and dissociative disorders, which is also a focus of this paper, few studies explore in detail the experiences, meaning-making, and...
This chapter advocates for integral ecological healing, particularly by attending to the practices of indigenous Amazonian communities. The use of psychedelic plant medicines in Amazonian shamanism exemplifies the kind of non-rational ways of knowing that expand human consciousness beyond the individual ego and into intimate communion with the more-than-human world.
At the extreme spectrum of consciousness during sleep, some patients with rare hypersomnias reported experiencing a specific night 'blackout' when sleeping, i.e., an absence of experiences or recall of them from sleep onset to offset. Thus, we explored through questionnaires the conscious experiences (dreaming experience, mind, self) during the night in 133 patients with idiopathic hypersomnia,...
An understanding of the roles of altered states of consciousness in disrupting entrenched and dysfunctional ways of thinking may give us hope for a correction to many of humanity's seemingly intractable problems. This article considers altered states induced via substances known as psychedelics at various levels of abstraction through the lenses of history, biology and botany, neurophysiology,...
Mindfulness training is believed to encourage self-transcendent states, but little research has examined this hypothesis. This study examined the effects of mindfulness training on two phenomenological features of self-transcendence: 1) perceived body boundary dissolution, and 2) more allocentric spatial frames of reference. A sample of healthy, young adults (n=45) were randomized to five...
A theory of consciousness, whatever else it may do, must address the structure of experience. Our perceptual experiences are richly structured. Simply seeing a red apple, swaying between green leaves on a stout tree, involves symmetries, geometries, orders, topologies, and algebras of events. Are these structures also present in the world, fully independent of their observation? Perceptual...
One of Endel Tulving's most important contributions to memory research is the coupling of self-knowing consciousness (or "autonoesis") with episodic memory. According to Tulving, autonoetic episodic memory enables the uniquely human neurocognitive operation of "mental time travel", which is the ability to deliberately "project" oneself to a specific time and place to remember personally...
Perhaps the two most important concepts in the history of philosophy are God and mind. Unsurprisingly, both are notoriously vague, which is a large part of the reason why there has been such a diversity of views on these topics. Needless to say, the literature on each is vast. Less examined, though, is the intersection of these two concepts. ›God as mind‹; ›mind as God‹—what can these mean?...
In this article, I present the concept of “birthing consciousness,” a psychophysical altered state of women that can occur during natural and undisturbed birth. I demonstrate that this altered state of consciousness (ASC) has phenomenological and cognitive features of hypofrontality; thus, birthing consciousness probably shares a similar brain mechanism to that postulated by the...