Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Kieran C R Fox, Savannah Nijeboer, Elizaveta Solomonova et al.
297 citations
Mind wandering during wakefulness and dreaming during sleep share many features: both involve audiovisual, emotional, fantasy-tinged narratives tied to personal concerns, draw on long-term memory, simulate social interactions, and lack meta-awareness. Comparing neuroimaging data shows that both states activate default mode network regions such as medial prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, and posterior cingulate, which support self-referential thought and memory. However, dreaming appears as an intensified version of mind wandering, with longer, more immersive, and more visual content, along with even deeper deactivation of prefrontal executive regions responsible for cognitive control and metacognition. This suggests dreaming amplifies the same features that distinguish mind wandering from goal-directed thought.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
September 12, 2013
Jakub Limanowski, Felix Blankenburg
285 citations
Minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS) is the basic, pre-reflective experience of being a self, emerging from self-modeling mechanisms rooted in bodily processes. The free energy principle (FEP) describes how self-organizing systems optimize hierarchical generative models of sensory causes by minimizing free energy. Predictive coding and active inference within the FEP highlight the role of embodiment for predictive self-modeling. This review maps MPS onto a hierarchical generative model under the FEP, explaining key constituents like multisensory integration, interoception, agency, perspective, and mineness. The authors conclude that this framework may underlie higher-level cognitive self-referral and understanding other minds.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Sanneke De Haan, Erik Rietveld, Martin Stokhof et al.
218 citations
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) produces profound changes beyond symptom reduction, altering patients' entire way of being in the world. Standard psychiatric scales fail to capture these global effects. The authors propose an enactive, affordance-based model describing four aspects of the person-world interaction: the perceived field of affordances (width, depth, and height); self-experience including mood and feelings; the mode of relating to the world; and the existential stance—the second-order evaluation of these changes. This model aims to specify the phenomenological effects of DBS treatment.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Yair Dor-Ziderman, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Joseph Glicksohn et al.
207 citations
Long-term mindfulness meditation can alter self-awareness by reducing identification with a static self. A study of 12 experienced meditators used magnetoencephalography and first-person reports to distinguish two types of self-awareness: narrative self-awareness, which involves weaving memories and plans into a coherent identity, and minimal self-awareness, focused on present-moment experience. Attenuating narrative self-awareness corresponded to decreased gamma-band power in frontal and medial prefrontal regions. Attenuating minimal self-awareness involved decreased beta-band power in a network including ventral medial prefrontal, medial posterior, and lateral parietal regions. The experience of selflessness was linked to decreased beta-band activity in the right inferior parietal lobule.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2011
Zoran Josipovic, Ilan Dinstein, Jochen Weber et al.
164 citations
The human cortex is organized into two broad systems: an extrinsic system that responds to external stimuli and tasks, and an intrinsic system linked to internal, self-related experiences. These systems typically show anti-correlated activity, even at rest. This experiment tested whether meditation can alter that competition. Participants either fixated without meditation or practiced non-dual awareness or focused attention meditations. Anti-correlation between the extrinsic and intrinsic systems was stronger during focused attention and weaker during non-dual awareness compared to fixation. Correlations within each system did not change. The results indicate that the anti-correlation between these systems is not fixed and that different meditation practices can modulate this functional brain organization in distinct ways.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2012
Manish Saggar, Brandon G King, Anthony P Zanesco et al.
136 citations
Intensive meditation training produces replicable changes in brainwave activity. In a controlled study, participants who practiced focused attention meditation for three months showed reduced beta-band power over anterior and posterior scalp regions during meditation, compared to a wait-list group that later received identical training. Individual alpha frequency also decreased across both retreats, and the decrease was directly related to the amount of meditation practice. These longitudinal changes in brain oscillatory activity help explain how meditation may support long-term improvements in attention and cognition.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Juliana Bagdasaryan, Michel Le van Quyen
124 citations
Neurophenomenology aims to combine neuroscience with the study of conscious experience, but integrating first-person reports with brain data remains challenging. Neurofeedback, where people learn to regulate their own brain activity in real time, offers a practical way to braid together subjective experience and neural measurements. In this iterative closed-loop setup, conscious activities can directly influence neuronal patterns, illustrating downward causation. The paper discusses mechanisms that might mediate such effects and outlines future research directions.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Micah Allen, Jonathan Smallwood, Joanna Christensen et al.
100 citations
Mind-wandering, or task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs), is common and often impairs performance on demanding tasks, but new findings show it can also enhance metacognitive abilities. Using the Error Awareness Task (EAT), researchers found that individual differences in average TUTs strongly predicted stop accuracy, while variability in TUTs specifically predicted error awareness. Brain imaging revealed that both response inhibition and TUT ratings activated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the default mode network (DMN), but in distinct dorsal areas, suggesting functional segregation. Co-activation of salience and default mode regions during error awareness linked monitoring to TUTs. The results suggest that fluctuations between internal and external thought, rather than constant focus, characterize individuals with greater metacognitive monitoring, and balancing these modes may optimize task performance.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Anthony P Zanesco, Brandon G King, Katherine A Maclean et al.
96 citations
One month of intensive daily Vipassana meditation training improved executive control on a 32-minute response inhibition task. Trained participants showed better accuracy and reduced reaction time variability compared to matched controls. They also reported increased concentration during the task, but not changes in effort or motivation. Higher concentration ratings predicted lower reaction time variability, linking subjective concentrative engagement with objective attentional stability. The findings support contemplative claims that meditation leads to stable, clear attentional focus and suggest that meditators accurately perceive their improved cognitive performance.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Daniel D Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff, Erik Myin
94 citations
Rejecting mental representation as the basis of cognition, radical enactive and embodied approaches challenge mainstream cognitive science. This paper argues that abandoning representationalism for pure empirical functionalism fails to provide a clear criterion for what counts as cognitive and lacks adequate ways to distinguish cognitive activity. It also contends that commonsense functionalism is undermined by how people actually use psychological concepts. Instead, the authors advocate for extensive enactivism, which differs from extended mind and distributed cognition theories by grounding cognition in embodied action without relying on internal representations.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Claire Petitmengin, Jean-Philippe Lachaux
90 citations
Neurophenomenology aims to combine neural and experiential descriptions of cognitive processes, but faces a practical difficulty: neural measures typically have coarser functional selectivity than the micro-dynamics of brief mental events. A new approach is proposed, using human intra-cerebral EEG (iEEG) to capture neural micro-dynamics with millimetric and millisecond precision, alongside disciplined elicitation techniques for accessing experiential micro-dynamics. This lays the foundation for a microcognitive science that practically implements neurophenomenology to investigate human cognition at the subsecond level.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2012
Douglas Roberts-Wolfe, Matthew D Sacchet, Elizabeth Hastings et al.
79 citations
A 12-week mindfulness course increased recall of positive words and improved psychological well-being in university students compared to an active control (music) course. Greater positive word recall was linked to higher well-being and lower depression and anxiety. Mindfulness training may enhance well-being by altering how emotional information is processed, though self-selection could have influenced results.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Patricia Bockelman, Lauren Reinerman-Jones, Shaun Gallagher
47 citations
Neurophenomenology merges objective measurements, such as EEG, with first-person reports of experience to study consciousness while retaining the statistical rigor of cognitive science. A review of a baseline study identifies three key improvements for future research: building shared mental models across interdisciplinary teams, maintaining high experimental standards for control and replicability, and refining phenomenological interviews so the interviewer actively guides the interaction with the subject. These enhancements aim to advance understanding of cognition and experience.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Omar T Khachouf, Stefano Poletti, Giuseppe Pagnoni
34 citations
Neurophenomenology aims to bridge subjective experience and brain data by treating the body as central to consciousness. This paper argues that the Kantian concept of a priori structures, which make experience possible, can be grounded in biology through an extended theory of autopoiesis. Examples from simple models, bacteria, the immune system, mirror neurons, and the default mode network illustrate how knowledge is enacted. The free-energy principle is presented as a neural framework that fits these ideas. The authors maintain that first-person experience remains essential for understanding brain function because it shares the same transcendental structure, and they discuss how meditation can contribute to this research.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2018
Brice Martin, Nicolas Franck, Michel Cermolacce et al.
32 citations
Distortions in the automatic sense of time may be linked to disturbances in the minimal self in schizophrenia, but timing deficits are hard to measure objectively. This case report describes AF, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia and no antipsychotic medication, who shows few symptoms and normal cognition but high levels of minimal self disorders. In a variable foreperiod task, AF preserved the ability to distinguish time intervals but had difficulty using the passage of time to anticipate a visual stimulus and struggled to adapt to changing time delays. The impairments were large enough to detect at the individual level. Results suggest that exploring timing deficits individually is feasible and may relate to self disorders.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2022
Arnfinn Aamodt, André Sevenius Nilsen, Rune Markhus et al.
29 citations
In a follow-up EEG sleep study, brain signal complexity (Lempel-Ziv complexity, LZC) decreased progressively from wakefulness into deeper non-REM sleep. However, within NREM2 sleep, there was no significant difference in LZC between dream and non-dream awakenings, and no correlation between LZC and subjective ratings of dream vividness, diversity, or perceptual quality. The authors failed to reproduce their earlier finding that posterior LZC increased with more perceptual dream experiences. This raises doubts about whether EEG LZC is a reliable marker of richness of experience within the same sleep stage.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2018
Eddy J Davelaar, Joe M Barnby, Soma Almasi et al.
29 citations
Learning to control one's own brain activity through neurofeedback may depend on the kind of subjective experience trainees have during training. In a short session where participants enhanced mid-frontal alpha power, those who learned reported sensing their inner and outer environment, while non-learners engaged in effortful trying, such as willing a bar to move. A classification system for verbal reports was developed to analyze these differences. The findings suggest that a sensing-oriented mindset, rather than active striving, is associated with successful neurofeedback learning.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2024
Brian Lord, Joseph L Sanguinetti, Lisannette Ruiz et al.
28 citations
Transcranial focused ultrasound (TFUS) aimed at the posterior cingulate cortex reduces functional connectivity along the midline of the default mode network (DMN) in healthy people. In a randomized, single-blind trial with 30 participants, those receiving active TFUS showed significant connectivity decreases and reported increased state mindfulness, reduced vigor, and temporary changes in sense of self, time, and memory recall. The sham group also showed increased mindfulness but no other subjective effects. TFUS can alter DMN connectivity and subjective experience, suggesting it may serve as a research tool and potential therapeutic intervention.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Michael Lifshitz, Emma P Cusumano, Amir Raz
28 citations
Hypnosis can rapidly and dramatically alter subjective experience with just a few words of suggestion, unlike contemplative practices requiring lengthy training. Individuals highly responsive to hypnosis can quickly manifest atypical conscious experiences and override deeply entrenched processes, offering new ways to suspend habitual attention and achieve refined meta-awareness. Hypnosis research also illuminates how suggestion, expectation, and interpersonal factors shape experience beyond hypnotic procedures. Incorporating hypnosis into neurophenomenology could help bridge subjective experience with third-person scientific approaches to the mind.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Serge Stoléru
24 citations
Sexual drives have four defining features—pressure, aim, object, and source—as described by Freud. Functional neuroimaging studies of sexual arousal reveal neural correlates for these features, largely supporting the Freudian model. However, a key difference emerges regarding the source of drives: psychoanalysis views the source as peripheral excitation, but neuroimaging suggests that in adults, central brain processing of visual or genital stimuli, rather than peripheral processes, determines sexually arousing and pleasurable experiences. Based on these findings, possible refinements to psychoanalytic theory are proposed.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2014
Dobromir G Dotov
23 citations
A radical embodied cognitive neuroscience (RECN) that treats the central nervous system as a nonlinear dynamical system must reconcile with existing neurodynamic approaches. The paper reviews how the brain and behavior are linked through circular causality and criticizes three current methods for linking dynamics to brain function. It proposes that studying brain self-organization without considering ecological embedding is insufficient. The authors argue the central nervous system has two roles: being easily enslaved by behavioral patterns that guide an animal through its environment, and flexibly switching among patterns via a metastable circuit breaker. Motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease, explained as excessive stability of this circuit breaker, support the idea.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2013
José-luis Díaz
19 citations
Certain first-person narrations of mental processes, especially internal monologues in which an author declares actual thoughts aloud, are particularly suitable for modeling streams of consciousness. A narrative method to extract and depict conscious processes from such texts requires three steps: operational criteria for selecting a phenomenological text, a system for detecting text items indicative of conscious contents and processes, and a procedure for representing these items in formal dynamic system devices like Petri nets. The method is applied to an interior monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses, and an inter-subjective evaluation of mental attributions from Miguel de Unamuno's Intimate Journal is presented using mathematical tools.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2022
Lawrence M Ward, Ramón Guevara
17 citations
Phenomenal consciousness arises from the electromagnetic field generated by a specific part of the thalamus in mammals and homologous brain regions in other animals. This field is structured by emulating information from both external and internal sources, producing qualia. What distinguishes the conscious EM field from other brain EM fields is that it models niche-relevant, action-relevant information (affordances) as a Gestalt—the best possible representation of the organism's moment-to-moment environment. Lower-level information, such as unanalyzed retinal signals, is excluded because it is not niche-relevant. This model enables organisms to control their actions within their environment.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2019
Ravinder Jerath, Connor Beveridge, Michael Jensen
17 citations
Brain waves of different frequencies are not just spatially separate but form a layered, hierarchical structure that mirrors the layered nature of conscious experience. The slowest oscillations act as a foundation that coordinates faster ones, together creating a unified metastable continuum. This isomorphism between neural oscillations and phenomenal experience explains how voluntary breathing and meditation can modulate the mind and have therapeutic effects for psychiatric disorders.
Frontiers in human neuroscience
January 1, 2021
Annika Lübbert, Florian Göschl, Hanna Krause et al.
14 citations
Social cognition can be grounded in sensorimotor interactions shared across agents. An action-oriented account emerges from a broader interpretation of sensorimotor contingencies, where dynamic informational and sensorimotor coupling across agents mediates action-effect contingencies in social contexts. This framework, socializing sensorimotor contingencies (socSMCs), integrates neuroscience, psychology, and human-robot interaction research. Empirical findings suggest sensorimotor and informational entrainment plays an important role in social contexts. Social cognitive phenomena like joint attention, mutual trust, and empathy rely heavily on such coupling between agents. This insight may provide novel remedies for disturbed social cognition and lead to more natural human-robot interfaces.