5 “I kind of enjoyed the next few hours till dinner. I was still kind of floating on air” (5: 06) (T29). 6 “I had this awkward weight that I carried around me wherever I went (0: 47) ... Literally I had the sensation of this steal armor that I wore my entire life [that] – chunks of it – were falling off (3: 03)” (T16). 7 “I did immediately following the first session – and in the second and in...
Yoga, meditation, and asceticism have been intimately linked throughout Indian religious history since the early beginnings in the ascetic reformism of India’s “axial age.” Traditional yoga addresses the main concerns of the ascetic reformism and is a practical method to solve the problem of suffering and attain liberation from this world. It primarily refers to the practice of meditation as...
Lucid dreaming refers to the phenomenon of becoming aware of the fact that one is dreaming during ongoing sleep. Despite having been physiologically validated for decades, the neurobiology of lucid dreaming is still incompletely characterized. Here we review the neuroscientific literature on lucid dreaming, including electroencephalographic, neuroimaging, brain lesion, pharmacological and brain...
Understanding the origin of the main physiological processes involved in consciousness is a major challenge of contemporary neuroscience, with crucial implications for the study of Disorders of Consciousness (DOC). The difficulties in achieving this task include the considerable quantity of experimental data in this field, along with the non-intuitive, nonlinear nature of neuronal dynamics. One...
B. Abstract Background. Despite their intriguing nature, investigations of the neurophysiology of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-antagonists Xenon (Xe) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) are limited and have revealed inconsistent frequency-dependent alterations, in spectral power and functional connectivity. Discrepancies are likely due to using low resolution electroencephalography restricted to sensor...
How is our bodily self-consciousness acquired, and how does it affect cognition? To investigate this, we conducted an experiment using the squeeze machine, a device that provides pressure along the length of the user's whole body. The squeeze machine is used to help autistic people relax. The inventor of the machine, Dr. Temple Grandin says that the squeeze machine, beyond bringing her...
We present select findings from a long-term follow-up qualitative study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for veterans, firefighters, and police officers suffering from chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted at participants' one-year follow-up after a recently completed phase 2 clinical trial. Available interviews from 19 of 24 participants were...
Abstract: Minds enable people to perceive, imagine, solve problems, understand, learn, speak, reason, create, and be emotional and conscious. Competing explanations of how the mind works have identified it as soul, computer, brain, dynamical system, or social construction. This book explains minds in terms of interacting mechanisms operating at multiple levels, including the social, mental,...
The paper is a dialogue between the psychiatrist and the philosopher on schizophrenia and the problems of consciousness, personality, “norms” and “deviations” in human psychic life. Considering some classical and contemporary approaches to schizophrenia, the paper offers a new gaze at this phenomenon of human cultural history. Parallels are drawn between schizophrenia and mythology as well as...
The relationship among self, mind and brain is not clearly known. Self's subjective experience of perception and cognition of words, feeling, thoughts etc. is supported by the integrity of human brain. The relationship between the self and human brain activity is not explicitly understood. Recent experimental evidence suggests that the neural correlate of consciousness is located in certain...