Frontiers in Psychology
September 16, 2014
Joaquin eNavajas, Hernan Gonzalo Rey, Rodrigo eQuian Quiroga
In the last decades, the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) have been explored using both invasive and non-invasive recordings by comparing the brain activity elicited by seen versus unseen visual stimuli (i.e., the contrastive analysis). Here, we review a selection of these studies and discuss a set of considerations to improve the search for the NCCs using the contrastive analysis. In...
Frontiers in Psychology
September 16, 2014
Talis eBachmann, Anthony G. Hudetz
Research on neural correlates of consciousness has been conducted and carried out mostly from within two relatively autonomous paradigmatic traditions – studying the specific contents of conscious experience and their brain-process correlates and studying the level of consciousness. In the present paper we offer a theoretical integration suggesting that an emphasis has to be put on...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
September 9, 2014
Leandro Gaitán, J. Castresana
In his book De l'habitude (Of Habit), 1838, the philosopher and archeologist Felix Ravaisson deals with the study of habit by using a broad spectrum of sources ranging from Aristotle to Butler, Leibniz, Hume, Main de Biran and Schelling, among others. The combination of these authors together with the originality of Ravaisson's own results produces a work which, though brief, has inspired some...
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
September 2, 2014
Leonard Hummel
10 citations
A new era has emerged in research on entheogens largely due to clinical trials conducted at Johns Hopkins University and similar studies sponsored by the Council for Spiritual Practices. In these notes and queries, I reflect on implications of these developments for psychological studies of religion and on what this research may mean for Christian churches in the United States. I conclude that...
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
September 2, 2014
William A. Richards
17 citations
Renewed research with entheogens (psychedelic substances) has been able to facilitate the occurrence of mystical forms of consciousness in healthy volunteers with a high degree of reliability. This article explores the potential significance of this development for religious scholars, especially those interested in the study of mysticism. The definition of “mystical consciousness” employed in...
WIREs Cognitive Science
September 1, 2014
Marcello Costantini
Perceiving a body is a phenomenal experience completely different from experiencing a body as one's own body. Visual presentation of bodies or body parts recruits several occipitotemporal regions in the brain. Are these activations sufficient in order to change the phenomenal status of a body in one's own body? In this paper, I will review consolidated experimental evidence showing that the...
Preternature Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural
September 1, 2014
Morgan Shipley
4 citations
ABSTRACT In 1957, Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, a work that would galvanize debates regarding the sacredness and profaneness of mystical consciousness. In connecting psychedelically inspired, unmediated perception with mystical, and perennial, modes of understanding, Huxley, critics like R. C. Zaehner declared, elided the conditions that make mystical consciousness possible,...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2014
Ned Block
125 citations
Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has eluded resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects' reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended 'ensemble properties' can be detected 'for free' without decreasing working memory capacity.
Ricerca Psicoanalitica
August 31, 2014
Manlio Iofrida, Alberto Lorenzini
Starting from the Christian concept of incarnation, seen as a theological way of posing the problem of the relationship between primary and higher consciousness, between logos and perception, the two authors link it to the studies of Sanders and Tronick's infant research, which highlight the extraordinary richness of procedural consciousness, of the prelogical and corporeal moment of our...
Frontiers in Psychology
August 26, 2014
Megan Wang, Biyu J. He
What neural mechanisms underlie the seamless flow of our waking consciousness? A necessary albeit insufficient condition for such neural mechanisms is that they should be consistently modulated across time were a segment of the conscious stream to be repeated twice. In this study, we experimentally manipulated the content of a story followed by subjects during functional magnetic resonance...