ABSTRACT Meditation, an ancient Eastern spiritual practice, is increasingly being practised in the West where its benefits for mental and physical health have been established. Extreme mental states that can be encountered in the context of meditation have also been reported and often have been labelled as psychosis or spiritual emergency. This study aimed for more nuanced understanding of the...
Study Objectives: This study used ambulatory polysomnography (PSG) to investigate post-traumatic nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The key research question was whether post-traumatic nightmares occur in both rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, and if so, whether nightmares in each sleep stage differed in content, phenomenology, and heart rate response. Underlying...
Under the predictive coding framework, perceptual learning and inference are dependent on the interaction between top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory signals both between and within regions in a network. However, how such feedback and feedforward connections are modulated in the state induced by lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is poorly understood. In this study, an auditory oddball...
The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and...
Cognitive phenomenology Resum: La naturalesa i les característiques del pensament conscient han ocupat la filosofia i altres ciències al llarg de la història. Darrerament, però, ha sorgit la pregunta per les propietats fenomèniques del pensament, això és, pel caràcter qualitatiu de les experiències del pensar o el que s’ha anomenat ‘fenomenologia cognitiva’. L’existència d’aquest tipus de...
We argue that subjective emotional experience, the feeling, is the essence of an emotion, and that objective manifestations in behavior and in body or brain physiology are, at best, indirect indicators of these inner experiences. As a result, the most direct way to assess conscious emotional feelings is through verbal self-report. This creates a methodological barrier to studies of conscious...
This paper is the text of a keynote lecture for the conference "Buddhism, Mind, and Cognitive Science" at the University of California, Berkeley, April 25, 2014. The main proposition is that the Buddhism-cognitive science encounter needs to be fundamentally reoriented in order to have a chance of becoming a genuine dialogue. At present, the encounter takes its direction from scientific research...
This chapter begins by examining the origins and development of the anthropological study of magic to identify factors and mentalities that define magic as a distinctive category of ideas and practices. In continuum, the study of modern magic is addressed from the perspective of the contemporary academic study of Western esotericism to consider how magic has traditionally been treated as...
La DMT (N,N-diméthyltryptamine) est une puissante tryptamine à effet de courte durée qui a gagné en popularité au cours de la dernière décennie, indépendamment de l’ayahuasca, un breuvage visionnaire d’Amazonie dont elle est un des principaux ingrédients actifs. Réputée pour sa capacité à déclencher des expériences extracorporelles et de profondes modifications de la perception sensorielle, de...
The abstract has been reorganized. The new version is as follows: “Background: The relationship between awareness and attention is complex and controversial. A growing body of literature has shown that the neural bases of consciousness and endogenous attention (voluntary attention) are independent. The important role of exogenous attention (reflexive attention) on conscious experience has been...