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Trance is an absorptive state of consciousness characterized by narrowed awareness of external surroundings and has long been used-for example, by shamans-to gain insight. Shamans across cultures often induce trance by listening to rhythmic drumming. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the brain-network configuration associated with trance. Experienced shamanic...
By definition, hallucinations occur only in the full waking state. Yet similarities to sleep-related experiences such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, dreams and parasomnias, have been noted since antiquity. These observations have prompted researchers to suggest a common aetiology for these phenomena based on the neurobiology of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. With our recent...
Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the “phenomenological attitude” may foster a deeper appreciation of the...
We consider a collection of distributed units that interact with one another through the sending of messages. Each message carries a positive ($+1$) or negative ($-1$) tag and causes the receiving unit to send out messages as a function of the tags it has received and a threshold. This simple model abstracts some of the essential characteristics of several systems used in the field of...
This is an attempt to investigate the causal relationship existing between the psychedelic literary genre in fiction and the application of trauma theory in the study of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Trauma theory, which is a psychological theory in essence; has been widely linked to the study of literature since traumatic responses take narrative forms. Scientifically, many studies have...
Although previous studies have suggested that conflict control can occur in the absence of consciousness, the brain mechanisms underlying unconscious and conscious conflict control remain unclear. The current study used a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design to collect data from 24 participants while they performed a masked Stroop priming task under both conscious...
Blindsight patients can detect, localize, and discriminate visual stimuli in their blind field, despite denying being able to see the stimuli. However, the literature documents the cases of blindsight patients who demonstrated a preserved degree of awareness in their impaired visual field. The aim of this study is to investigate the nature of visual processing within the impaired visual field...
One of the main goals of neuroscience is to understand how an organism's cognitive capacities or physiological states are potentially related to brain activities that involve the interaction of multiple brain structures and cortical areas. A key feature of functional brain networks is that they are modularly structured, and this modular architecture is regarded as accounting for a range of...
PLoS OneJune 14, 2016Todd Zorick, Mark A Mandelkern
Recently, many lines of investigation in neuroscience and statistical physics have converged to raise the hypothesis that the underlying pattern of neuronal activation which results in electroencephalography (EEG) signals is nonlinear, with self-affine dynamics, while scalp-recorded EEG signals themselves are nonstationary. Therefore, traditional methods of EEG analysis may miss many properties...