April 3, 2018
Kristoffer Appel, Gordon Pipa, Martin Dresler
During dreaming, we experience a wake-like hallucinatory reality, however with restricted reflective abilities: in the face of a bizarre dream environment, we do not realize that we are actually dreaming. In contrast, during the rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming, the dreamer gains insight into the current state of mind while staying asleep. This metacognitive insight often enables the dreamer...
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
April 2, 2018
Joselaine Ida Da Cruz, Solange Aparecida Nappo
35 citations
The low efficacy of crack cocaine addiction treatment available in Brazil has led Brazilian users to find alternatives to reduce drug consumption or even to reach abstinence. One of them is the use of entheogenic substances, like ayahuasca, an infusion obtained from two native plant species from the Amazon. The present report aimed to understand how crack cocaine users recover from drug...
Hong Kong medical journal = Xianggang yi xue za zhi
April 2018
Y L Hong, C H Yee, Y H Tam et al.
Ketamine is an N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor antagonist, a dissociative anaesthetic agent and a treatment option for major depression, treatment-resistant depression, and bipolar disorder. Its strong psychostimulant properties and easy absorption make it a favourable candidate for substance abuse. Ketamine entered Hong Kong as a club drug in 2000 and the first local report of...
English language notes
April 1, 2018
Robert O. Pasnau
I am a historian of philosophy and theology, which is to say that the authors I work on are almost exclusively those who make doctrine. Moreover, a great deal of my work has been focused on Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine maker extraordinaire of the later Middle Ages. From that vantage point, it is interesting to consider the question of whether mysticism, by its nature, must necessarily conflict...
Cortex
April 2018
Roy Salomon, Roberta Ronchi, Jonathan Dönz et al.
Interoceptive signals, such as the heartbeat, are processed in a network of brain regions including the insular cortex. Recent studies have shown that such signals modulate perceptual and cognitive processing, and that they impact visual awareness. For example, visual stimuli presented synchronously to the heartbeat take longer to enter visual awareness than the same stimuli presented...
Neuropsychologia
April 2018
Itsaso Colás, Almudena Capilla, Ana B Chica
The relation between attention and consciousness is a highly debated topic in Cognitive Neuroscience. Although there is an agreement about their relationship at the functional level, there is still no consensus about how these two cognitive processes interact at the neural level. According to the gateway hypothesis (Posner, 1994), attention filters the information accessing to consciousness,...
The Journal of Humanistic Counseling
April 1, 2018
Brett D. Wilkinson
17 citations
Neuroscience‐informed counselors suggest that understanding the brain can transform the field of counseling. This article addresses flaws in such arguments. Distinctions are drawn between supportive and informative empirical findings, explanatory and descriptive viewpoints, and the easy and hard problems of consciousness. The author proposes a new theoretical model to ensure working dialogues...
Studies in history and philosophy of science
April 1, 2018
Gary Fuller
In the philosophy of mind and psychology, a central question since the 1960s has been that of how to give a philosophically adequate formulation of mind-body physicalism. A large quantity of work on the topic has been done in the interim. There have been, and continue to be, extensive discussions of the ideas of physicalism, identity, functionalism, realization, and constitution. My aim in this...
Neuroimage
April 1, 2018
Ezequiel Mikulan, Eugenia Hesse, Lucas Sedeño et al.
Neural synchrony in the γ-band is considered a fundamental process in cortical computation and communication and it has also been proposed as a crucial correlate of consciousness. However, the latter claim remains inconclusive, mainly due to methodological limitations, such as the spectral constraints of scalp-level electroencephalographic recordings or volume-conduction confounds. Here, we...
Journal of Neurophysiology
April 1, 2018
Shen-Mou Hsu, Yu-Fang Yang
An important issue facing the empirical study of consciousness concerns how the contents of incoming stimuli gain access to conscious processing. According to classic theories, facial stimuli are processed in a hierarchical manner. However, it remains unclear how the brain determines which level of stimulus content is consciously accessible when facing an incoming facial stimulus. Accordingly,...