International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
January 1, 2025
Marianna de Abreu Costa, Alexander Moreira-Almeida
7 citations
Dualism—the view that mind and brain are separate—remains common, even among mental health professionals, though it declines with age, likely due to generational shifts rather than personal maturation. Academic training often embeds physicalist, reductive views emphasizing biological causes such as gene expression and neurologic alterations. Radical determinism aligned with physicalism can diminish perceptions of responsibility, agency, and free will, affecting personal autonomy and legal systems by portraying individuals as less responsive to rehabilitation and more prone to repeat behaviors. In mental health, these views shape understanding of disorder origins, treatment approaches, patient self-agency, and stigma. Biogenetic models reduce blame but lower perceptions of self-control and increase perceptions of unpredictability.
International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
January 1, 2025
Alexander Moreira-Almeida
4 citations
A 'Pragmatic interactionist' framework proposes that the mind exists and functions beyond the brain, survives bodily death, and the brain acts as a tool and filter for mind manifestation. Based on evidence from near-death, out-of-body, mediumistic experiences, and memories of previous lives, the framework expands naturalism and the empirical base to include anomalous experiences. Research proposals include studies of mind-over-brain phenomena, free will beyond extreme social and biological factors, enhanced mentation with a dysfunctional brain, veridical hallucinations, extracerebral memory, and early personality differences between monozygotic twins. This working hypothesis aims to enlarge observational and analytical capacities to better understand the human mind.
International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
January 1, 2025
Marianna de Abreu Costa, Alexander Moreira-Almeida
2 citations
Mediums claim to communicate with the deceased or non-material beings. Controlled studies show they can provide accurate information that cannot be explained by normal sensory means or inference. This review examines conventional explanations—fraud, sitter gullibility, wishful thinking, chance, mental disorder, and unconscious personification—alongside the non-conventional hypothesis that the mind exists beyond the brain. The paper critically analyzes evidence from mediumship studies that supports a mind independent of the physical brain, aiming to inform the understanding of consciousness and the mind-brain problem.