Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2023
Inês Hipólito, Jonas Mago, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
60 citations
Psychedelic therapy shows promise for mental health, but the psychological mechanisms behind its benefits are unclear. This paper proposes that psychedelics act as destabilizers, both psychologically and neurophysiologically, drawing on the 'entropic brain' hypothesis and the 'RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics' model. Using complex systems theory, it suggests that psychedelics disrupt fixed points or attractors, breaking reinforced patterns of thinking and behavior. The approach explains how increased brain entropy destabilizes neurophysiological set points, leading to new understandings of psychedelic psychotherapy. These insights have implications for reducing risks and optimizing treatment during both the peak experience and the subacute recovery period.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Inês Hipólito, Thomas Van Es
22 citations
Social cognition should not be understood as attributing mental states to others via representational models. Holding both enactivism and Theory of Mind creates contradictions because Theory of Mind assumes social cognition reduces to mental representation and relies on an innate, contentful 'toolkit' for theorizing—both rejected by enactivism. The paper advances an enactivist-dynamic alternative: social cognition is dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action. Using dynamical systems theory, it explains how socio-cognitive novelty arises in development, and active inference is used to show social understanding as generalized synchronization, avoiding representational assumptions.
July 13, 2022
Inês Hipólito, Jonas Mago, Fernando Rosas et al.
13 citations
preprint
Psychedelics may help treat mental health conditions by acting as psychological and neurophysiological destabilizers. Drawing on the entropic brain hypothesis and the REBUS model, this theoretical paper proposes that psychedelics break reinforced patterns of thinking and behaving by destabilizing fixed attractors in the brain. The resulting increase in brain entropy disrupts neurophysiological set-points, allowing for new conceptualizations of psychedelic psychotherapy. These insights have implications for risk mitigation and treatment optimization, both during the peak psychedelic experience and the sub-acute recovery period.
Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
August 1, 2016
Inês Hipólito
6 citations
Disorders of the self in schizophrenia involve a disturbance of the minimal self—the most basic component of selfhood. This work synthesizes concepts from neuroscience, epistemology, and phenomenology to argue that the second-person perspective, which focuses on direct interaction and experience with others, offers a key point of congruence between objective processes and subjective experience. The author examines self-related deficits in schizophrenia first through first-person and third-person perspectives, then through the less understood second-person perspective. First-person disturbances include spatially incongruent proprioception and an impaired sense of time. The second-person approach is productive for social cognition research and may yield practical consequences for evidence-based medicine.
Front Neurorobot
November 14, 2023
Adam Safron, Inês Hipólito, Andy Clark
2 citations
No Summary
October 4, 2023
Inês Hipólito, Sofia Tzima
2 citations
preprint
Cultural embodiment—how a person's cultural background shapes their sense of self—is crucial for understanding psychological experiences and treating mental health conditions. The paper argues that psychedelic-assisted therapy works not by updating a brain computational model, as traditional analytic philosophy suggests, but by enabling changes in a person's culturally situated self-narratives. The psychedelic experience causally facilitates these narrative pattern changes, which underlie therapeutic efficacy. This perspective offers a novel understanding of the therapeutic process and points toward more effective, culturally attuned mental health interventions.
PsyArXiv
May 3, 2023
Inês Hipólito
1 citation
preprint
Radically enactive (RE) accounts of perception directly oppose representationalist theories, including predictive processing (PP) approaches that retain some representational commitments. This chapter evaluates which framework better explains a class of perceptual illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion, where what we see fails to update based on what we know. Two prominent PP attempts—one conservative, one radical—are reviewed and rejected as inadequate. Instead, the authors propose a simpler RE explanation: basic perceiving consists of contentless, non-inferential habits that precede and underlie contentful perceptual judgment. This account elegantly explains the full pattern of responses to such illusions.