Recently, Elio Conte has commented a paper by the present author devoted to analyze the possibility of checking experimentally whether the perceptual process can lead to the collapse of the wavefunction. Here we answer to the comments by Conte and we show that he has missed to grasp the crucial elements of our proposal. Morever, we discuss some ideas put forward by Conte concerning the...
Advances in resuscitation science have indicated that, contrary to perception, death by cardiorespiratory criteria can no longer be considered a specific moment but rather a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs, and brain to stop functioning. The resultant loss of vital signs of life (and life processes) is used to declare a...
Influential models propose that conscious experience of extrastriate activity requires the integrity of primary visual cortex (V1). A new study challenges this view by demonstrating that when V1 is lesioned, visual qualia can be induced when transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is applied over the patients' ipsilesional hemisphere.
Many philosophers and brain scientists hold that explaining consciousness is one of the major outstanding problems facing modern science today. One type of consciousness in particular-phenomenal consciousness-is thought to be especially problematic. The reasons given for believing that this phenomenon exists in the first place, however, often hinge on the claim that its existence is simply...
Empirical phenomenology – study of lived subjective experience is the latest addition to the interdisciplinary efforts aiming at understanding the human mind. We present the research, which was originally aimed at investigating the experiences of Holotropic Breathwork, however, results of the analysis convinced us to move the focus of our interest to differences between individual ways of...
This article reviews mainstream scientific publications on near-death experiences (NDEs). We searched near-death experience in titles, key words, and abstracts at the Web of Knowledge database published between 1945 and 2013. We identified 266 relevant documents, the oldest from 1977. There was a strong predominance of opinion articles (book reviews, commentaries, and editorials), review...
We study the emergence of information integration in cellular automata (CA) with respect to states in the long run. Information integration is in this case quantified by applying the information-theoretic measure known as total correlation to the long-run distribution of CA states. Total correlation is the amount by which the total uncertainty associated with cell states surpasses the...
BackgroundSensory isolation in a flotation tank is a method known for inducing deep relaxation and subsequent positive health effects for patients suffering from e.g. stress or muscle tensions pains. Very few studies have investigated this method as a preventive health-care intervention. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects in healthy participants after receiving a series of...
This research explores the role that climbing plays in the spirituality of climbers.Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted following the framework of phenomenology which yielded five major themes.This study identified ways in which climbing was spiritually enriching, climbing's influence on spiritual development and wellbeing, how climbing led to having spiritual experiences and the...
During binocular rivalry, visual perception alternates spontaneously between two different monocular images. Such perceptual reversals are slowed or halted if stimuli are presented intermittently with inter-stimulus intervals larger than ~400 ms--a phenomenon called stabilization. Often, the neural correlates of reversal and stabilization are studied separately, and both phenomena in turn are...