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We recently completed the Fund Consciousness Science! Project: a workshop and subawards program aimed to align United States federal funding mechanisms and consciousness research. Here we describe the project’s motivation, execution, and outcomes to motivate similar efforts both locally and globally.

The designation of Diego Maradona's 'handball' goal, that it was an intervention by God himself, brings the phenomena of sport and religion into an interrelationship. The basic thesis of this paper is that, despite many of their phenomenal similarities, explicit religion is not, and cannot be, substantially related to sport, as the two manifest themselves in different ways of being. This thesis is supported by arguments from three philosophical areas: 1. The ontological dimension of the manifestation of the sacred in the profane through the process of hierophany in sport does not refer to a specific deity or God, and is therefore not a presentation but an indirect representation of the sacred; 2. The epistemological perspective of the intentional relation of consciousness to religious ritual justifies the necessity of situating them in an overall horizon of references and meanings to the horizon of the lifeworld; 3. The existential and experiential aspects of transformative sport experiences transform the horizon of meanings of empirical reality, but lack the sacramental perspective. Implicit religion as a possibility of transition on a continuum of complementary existential states is a suitable explicative framework for analyzing the phenomenal similarities and essential differences of religion and sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the information-processing architecture of the human brain organised, and how does its organisation support consciousness? Here, we combine network science and a rigorous information-theoretic notion of synergy to delineate a synergistic global workspace, comprising gateway regions that gather synergistic information from specialised modules across the human brain. This information is then integrated within the workspace and widely distributed via broadcaster regions. Through functional MRI analysis, we show that gateway regions of the synergistic workspace correspond to the human brains default mode network, whereas broadcasters coincide with the executive control network. We find that loss of consciousness due to general anaesthesia or disorders of consciousness corresponds to diminished ability of the synergistic workspace to integrate information, which is restored upon recovery. Thus, loss of consciousness coincides with a breakdown of information integration within the synergistic workspace of the human brain. This work contributes to conceptual and empirical reconciliation between two prominent scientific theories of consciousness, the Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory, while also advancing our understanding of how the human brain supports consciousness through the synergistic integration of information.

The field of Artificial Life studies the nature of the living state by modeling and synthesizing living systems. Such systems, under certain conditions, may come to deserve moral consideration similar to that given to nonhuman vertebrates or even human beings. The fact that these systems are nonhuman and evolve in a potentially radically different substrate should not be seen as an insurmountable obstacle to their potentially having rights, if they are sufficiently sophisticated in other respects. Nor should the fact that they owe their existence to us be seen as reducing their status as targets of moral concern. On the contrary, creators of Artificial Life may have special obligations to their creations, resembling those of an owner to their pet or a parent to their child. For a field that aims to create artificial life-forms with increasing levels of sophistication, it is crucial to consider the possible ethical implications of our activities, with an eye toward assessing potential moral obligations for which we should be prepared. If Artificial Life is larger than life, then the ethics of artificial beings should be larger than human ethics.

Affective touch-a slow, gentle, and pleasant form of touch-activates a different neural network than which is activated during discriminative touch in humans. Affective touch perception is enabled by specialized low-threshold mechanoreceptors in the skin with unmyelinated fibers called C tactile (CT) afferents. These CT afferents are conserved across mammalian species, including macaque monkeys. However, it is unknown whether the neural representation of affective touch is the same across species and whether affective touch's capacity to activate the hubs of the brain that compute socioaffective information requires conscious perception. Here, we used functional MRI to assess the preferential activation of neural hubs by slow (affective) vs. fast (discriminative) touch in anesthetized rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). The insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), amygdala, and secondary somatosensory cortex were all significantly more active during slow touch relative to fast touch, suggesting homologous activation of the interoceptive-allostatic network across primate species during affective touch. Further, we found that neural responses to affective vs. discriminative touch in the insula and ACC (the primary cortical hubs for interoceptive processing) changed significantly with age. Insula and ACC in younger animals differentiated between slow and fast touch, while activity was comparable between conditions for aged monkeys (equivalent to >70 y in humans). These results, together with prior studies establishing conserved peripheral nervous system mechanisms of affective touch transduction, suggest that neural responses to affective touch are evolutionarily conserved in monkeys, significantly impacted in old age, and do not necessitate conscious experience of touch.

Consolidating memories for long-term storage depends on reactivation. Reactivation occurs both consciously, during wakefulness, and unconsciously, during wakefulness and sleep. While considerable work has examined conscious awake and unconscious sleep reactivation, in this study, we directly compare the consequences of conscious and unconscious reactivation during wakefulness. Forty-one participants learned associations consisting of adjective-object-position triads. Objects were clustered into distinct semantic groups (e.g., fruits, vehicles) such that we could examine consequences of reactivation on semantically related memories. After an intensive learning protocol, we systematically reactivated some of the triads by presenting the adjective as a cue. Reactivation was done so that it was consciously experienced for some triads, and only unconsciously processed for others. Memory for spatial positions, the most distal part of the association, was affected by reactivation in a consciousness-dependent and memory-strength-dependent manner. Conscious reactivation resulted in weakening of semantically related memories that were strong initially, resonating with prior findings of retrieval-induced forgetting. Unconscious reactivation, on the other hand, selectively benefited weak reactivated memories, as previously shown for reactivation during sleep. Semantically linked memories were not impaired, but rather were integrated with the reactivated memory. These results taken together demonstrate that conscious and unconscious reactivation have qualitatively different consequences. Results support a consciousness-dependent inhibition account, whereby unconscious reactivation entails less inhibition than conscious reactivation, thus allowing more liberal spread of activation. Findings set the stage for additional exploration into the role of conscious experience in memory storage and structuring.

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Recent findings have shown that psychedelics reliably enhance brain entropy (understood as neural signal diversity), and this effect has been associated with both acute and long-term psychological outcomes, such as personality changes. These findings are particularly intriguing, given that a decrease of brain entropy is a robust indicator of loss of consciousness (e.g., from wakefulness to sleep). However, little is known about how context impacts the entropy-enhancing effect of psychedelics, which carries important implications for how it can be exploited in, for example, psychedelic psychotherapy. This article investigates how brain entropy is modulated by stimulus manipulation during a psychedelic experience by studying participants under the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or placebo, either with gross state changes (eyes closed vs open) or different stimuli (no stimulus vs music vs video). Results show that while brain entropy increases with LSD under all of the experimental conditions, it exhibits the largest changes when subjects have their eyes closed. Furthermore, brain entropy changes are consistently associated with subjective ratings of the psychedelic experience, but this relationship is disrupted when participants are viewing a video─potentially due to a competition between external stimuli and endogenous LSD-induced imagery. Taken together, our findings provide strong quantitative evidence of the role of context in modulating neural dynamics during a psychedelic experience, underlining the importance of performing psychedelic psychotherapy in a suitable environment.

BackgroundOver the past 30 years, there have been significant advances in the understanding of the mechanisms associated with loss and recovery of consciousness following severe brain injury. This work has provided a strong grounding for the development of novel restorative therapeutic interventions. Although all interventions are aimed at modulating and thereby restoring brain function, the landscape of existing interventions encompasses a very wide scope of techniques and protocols. Despite vigorous research efforts, few approaches have been assessed with rigorous, high-quality randomized controlled trials. As a growing number of exploratory interventions emerge, it is paramount to develop standardized approaches to reporting results. The successful evaluation of novel interventions depends on implementation of shared nomenclature and infrastructure. To address this gap, the Neurocritical Care Society's Curing Coma Campaign convened nine working groups and charged them with developing common data elements (CDEs). Here, we report the work of the Therapeutic Interventions Working Group.MethodsThe working group reviewed existing CDEs relevant to therapeutic interventions within the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke database and reviewed the literature for assessing key areas of research in the intervention space. CDEs were then proposed, iteratively discussed and reviewed, classified, and organized in a case report form (CRF).ResultsWe developed a unified CRF, including CDEs and key design elements (i.e., methodological or protocol parameters), divided into five sections: (1) patient information, (2) general study information, (3) behavioral interventions, (4) pharmacological interventions, and (5) device interventions.ConclusionsThe newly created CRF enhances systematization of future work by proposing a portfolio of measures that should be collected in the development and implementation of studies assessing novel interventions intended to increase the level of consciousness or rate of recovery of consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness.

Consciousness is thought to be regulated by bidirectional information transfer between the cortex and thalamus, but the nature of this bidirectional communication - and its possible disruption in unconsciousness - remains poorly understood. Here, we present two main findings elucidating mechanisms of corticothalamic information transfer during conscious states. First, we identify a highly preserved spectral channel of cortical-thalamic communication that is present during conscious states, but which is diminished during the loss of consciousness and enhanced during psychedelic states. Specifically, we show that in humans, mice, and rats, information sent from either the cortex or thalamus via δ/θ/α waves (∼1-13 Hz) is consistently encoded by the other brain region by high γ waves (52-104 Hz); moreover, unconsciousness induced by propofol anesthesia or generalized spike-and-wave seizures diminishes this cross-frequency communication, whereas the psychedelic 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) enhances this low-to-high frequency interregional communication. Second, we leverage numerical simulations and neural electrophysiology recordings from the thalamus and cortex of human patients, rats, and mice to show that these changes in cross-frequency cortical-thalamic information transfer may be mediated by excursions of low-frequency thalamocortical electrodynamics toward/away from edge-of-chaos criticality, or the phase transition from stability to chaos. Overall, our findings link thalamic-cortical communication to consciousness, and further offer a novel, mathematically well-defined framework to explain the disruption to thalamic-cortical information transfer during unconscious states.

The comparison between conscious and unconscious perception is a cornerstone of consciousness science. However, most studies reporting above-chance discrimination of unseen stimuli do not control for criterion biases when assessing awareness. We tested whether observers can discriminate subjectively invisible offsets of Vernier stimuli when visibility is probed using a bias-free task. To reduce visibility, stimuli were either backward masked or presented for very brief durations (1-3 milliseconds) using a modern-day Tachistoscope. We found some behavioral indicators of perception without awareness, and yet, no conclusive evidence thereof. To seek more decisive proof, we simulated a series of Bayesian observer models, including some that produce visibility judgements alongside type-1 judgements. Our data are best accounted for by observers with slightly suboptimal conscious access to sensory evidence. Overall, the stimuli and visibility manipulations employed here induced mild instances of blindsight-like behavior, making them attractive candidates for future investigation of this phenomenon.

Predicting Click-Through Rate (CTR) is crucial in product and content recommendation, as it involves estimating the likelihood of a user engaging with a specific advertisement or content link. This task encompasses understanding the complex cognitive processes behind human interactions with recommended content. Learning varied feature embeddings that reflect different cognitive responses in various circumstances is significantly important. However, traditional methods typically learn fixed feature representations, leading to suboptimal performance. Some recent approaches attempt to address this issue by learning bit-wise weights or augmented embeddings for feature representations, but suffer from uninformative or redundant features in the context. To tackle this problem, inspired by the Global Workspace Theory in conscious processing, which posits that only a specific subset of the product features are pertinent while the rest can be noisy and even detrimental to human-click behaviors, we propose a CTR model that enables Dynamic Embedding Learning with Truncated Conscious Attention for CTR prediction, termed DELTA. DELTA contains two key components:(I) conscious truncation module (CTM), which utilizes curriculum learning to apply adaptive truncation on attention weights to select the most critical feature in the context;(II) explicit embedding optimization (EEO), which applies an auxiliary task during training that directly and independently propagates the gradient from the loss layer to the embedding layer, thereby optimizing the embedding explicitly via linear feature crossing. Extensive experiments on five challenging CTR datasets demonstrate that DELTA achieves new state-of-the-art performance among current CTR methods.

Advancing intelligent systems requires efficient computational architectures built on emerging electronic computing devices, as well as effective biomimetic function simulation to improve overall intelligence. Here we design a memristor-based circuit inspired by self-awareness concepts. It effectively achieves bionic adaptive decision-making by mimicking habituation learning mechanisms. Memristors serve as foundational units in the circuit, facilitating the simulation of functions akin to biological neurons and synapses. They help implement key features such as information filtering, integration, and synaptic plasticity through concise circuit structures and efficient computing methods. Experimental results indicate that our circuit is capable of rapid and efficient information processing through in-memory analog computing, and it can make more reasonable and intelligent adaptive decisions by incorporating self-awareness concepts and biomimetic mechanisms. Extending this work to large-scale decision-making systems holds potential for intelligent platforms aiming to achieve advanced cognitive capabilities.

Sleep staging holds significant importance in clinical medicine, aiding in the diagnosis of various disorders related to sleep and cognition. However, manually annotating a large amount of sleep data is time-consuming and labor-intensive, making it difficult to achieve. Efficiently utilizing these unannotated data poses a challenging task. We propose a novel self-supervised learning method with Temporal-split Contrastive and Electrode Autoencoder (TsC-EA) for sleep staging. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in self-supervised learning on SleepEDF and MASS-SS3. Moreover, experimental results indicate that our method can surpass the performance of supervised learning methods using only 10% of labeled data. Additionally, we explore the application of self-supervised learning in patients with disorder of consciousness. It can assist in diagnosing the severity of DoC through analysis of sleep staging. Staging the sleep patterns of patients with disorders of consciousness can help in diagnosing the severity of their condition.

Prognostic assessment of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) remains one of the most challenging problems in contemporary medicine. The long treatment cycle and high costs of treatment are heavy burdens to our society. In this paper, we use deep network to investigate potential indicators of consciousness within brain signals of DoC patients. In the experiments, we study P300 and resting-state Electroencephalogram (rs-EEG) signals of 22 DoC patients to investigate neural correlation between brain signals and the improvement of consciousness. Synergistic integration of P300 and rs-EEG signals demonstrated superior predictive proficiency for cross-subject and cross-paradigm prognosis in DoC, achieving an accuracy of 81.1%. Our investigation is the first known to the literature to combine P300 and rs-EEG signals for analyzing DoC. This novel approach leverages advanced neural network models to elucidate the complex neural patterns associated with DoC, setting a precedent for future research in the field.

The nature of consciousness has been a long-debated concept related to human cognition and self-understanding. As AI systems become more capable and autonomous, it is an increasingly pressing matter whether they can be called conscious. In line with narrative-based theories, here we present a simple but concrete computational criterion for consciousness grounded in the querying of a virtual self-representation. We adopt a reinforcement learning (RL) setting and implement these ideas in SubjectZero, a planning-based deep RL agent which has an explicit virtual self-model and whose architecture draws similarities to multiple prominent consciousness theories. Being able to self-localize, simulate the world, and model its own internal state, it can support a primitive virtual narrative, the quality of which depends on the number of abstractions that the underlying generative model sustains. Task performance still ultimately depends on the modeling capabilities of the agent where intelligence, understood simply as the ability to model complicated relationships, is what matters.

Involuntary mental time travel (MTT) is spontaneously reliving past events or envisioning future scenarios without conscious effort. We explored the phenomenological characteristics and contents of self-caught and probe-caught spontaneous thoughts, focusing on involuntary MTTs. These paradigms differ in the meta-awareness they demand, which may affect the nature of the captured thoughts, especially under attentional load. During a vigilance task with different attentional loads, participants reported their thoughts as they realized them (self-caught) or when the task prompted them (probe-caught). They then completed questionnaires regarding their thoughts' phenomenological characteristics. We predict that self-caught thoughts will have a higher proportion of involuntary MTTs, marked by episodic and self-related content. Under high attentional load, involuntary MTTs are expected to comprise a larger proportion of reported thoughts in both paradigms. Investigating the characteristics of spontaneous thoughts and their modulation by attentional load contributes to a deeper understanding of the metacognitive processes underlying involuntary MTTs.

Implicit attitudes are often defined as residing beyond conscious awareness. This definition has been challenged by robust evidence demonstrating highly accurate predictions of implicit attitudes. However, relevant tests have all been conducted using well-known targets (e.g., racial groups), about which participants possess ample relevant knowledge. Therefore, accurate predictions may have emerged from inferential mechanisms rather than privileged first-person awareness. Here we probe participants' (N = 4,448) ability to report their own experimentally created implicit attitudes across four studies where implicit attitudes and their explicit counterparts (representing an obvious source of inference) were manipulated to shift in opposite directions. Predicted and actual implicit attitudes were either unrelated to each other, or predictive accuracy was limited to participants whose implicit and explicit attitudes were aligned. Echoing classic and contemporary accounts, these data suggest that implicit attitudes are (largely) unconscious, and successful implicit attitude predictions are likely subserved by inference rather than introspection.

This study investigates metacognitive awareness among students, focusing particularly on 'subjective confidence' as a predictor of potential conceptual change. In our study, 132 eighth graders completed a basic number knowledge test and evaluated their confidence level for each answer. Our analysis revealed that metacognitive accuracy—the alignment of confidence levels with actual performance—was significantly related to academic achievement scores in the 'Two-Numbers Comparison' task (e.g., choosing the correct inequality such as '1/2 > 1/3' or '1/2 < 1/3'), but not in the 'Number Approximations' task (e.g., choosing the closest result to '21/10 + 60/31' from options such as 2, 4, 41, or 81). Additionally, we observed distinct behavioral patterns in response times: the 'Two-Numbers Comparison' task elicited rapid responses, whereas the 'Number Approximations' task resulted in slower, more reflective responses. In conclusion, our results indicate that metacognitive processes are more actively engaged during intuitive thinking compared to reflective thinking.

Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is known to be associated with racing thoughts. Christoff et al. (2016) posit that the main determinant of the dynamics of spontaneous thoughts is the presence of constraints on cognition, be it automatic or deliberate. In the present project, we operationalized the unfolding of spontaneous thoughts with a word generation paradigm (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2021; Benedek et al., 2012; Jung, 1910): participants had to generate series of 10-30 words aloud, following a metronome. We set out to contrast two levels of constraint on associations (strong and weak) to test their impact on the dynamics of thoughts, and to relate it to sub-clinical ADHD-like symptomatology. Using reaction times and semantic metrics, we show that the participants who scored higher on an ADHD diagnostic questionnaire produced words that were less related, but only in the "weak constraint" condition - akin to free thoughts.

The automaticity of syntax has been a long-debated topic in psycholinguistics. One strategy to establish it involves finding significant evidence of syntactic priming in experimental tasks that restrict conscious awareness. Two common criteria to assess the unconscious nature of priming are that visibility (d') of masked words is not significantly different from zero, and that visibility is not positively correlated with the size of the priming effect. Unfortunately, these outcomes may also arise from low statistical power in visibility data and low reliability of dependent measures. We report results of a meta-analysis and a Bayesian re-analysis, which revealed low statistical power and evidence that "subliminal" words were actually visible for participants. Additionally, reliability analyses on Berkovitch and Dehaene's (2019) dataset showed that noisy measures may account for the lack of correlation between visibility and priming. These findings question the validity of previous results supporting the automatic nature of syntactic processing.

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a serotonergic psychedelic that induces a rapid and transient altered state of consciousness when inhaled or injected via bolus administration. Its marked and novel subjective effects make DMT a powerful tool for the neuroscientific study of consciousness and preliminary results show its potential role in treating mental health conditions. In a within-subjects, placebo-controlled study, we investigated a novel method of DMT administration involving a bolus injection paired with a constant-rate infusion, with the goal of extending the DMT experience. Pharmacokinetic parameters of DMT estimated from plasma data of a previous study of bolus intravenous DMT were used to derive dose regimens necessary to keep subjects in steady levels of immersion into the DMT experience over an extended period of 30 min, and four dose regimens consisting of a bolus loading dose and a slow-rate infusion were tested in eleven healthy volunteers (seven male, four female, mean age ± SD = 37.09 ± 8.93 years). The present method is effective for extending the DMT experience in a stable and tolerable fashion. While subjective effects were maintained over the period of active infusion, anxiety ratings remained low and heart rate habituated within 15 min, indicating psychological and physiological safety of extended DMT. Plasma DMT concentrations increased consistently starting 10 min into DMT administration, whereas psychological effects plateaued into the desired steady state, suggesting the development of acute psychological tolerance to DMT. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the safety and effectiveness of continuous IV DMT administration, laying the groundwork for the further development of this method of administration for basic and clinical research.

Objective Methods Results Significance An accurate evaluation of behavioral responsiveness during and after seizures in people with epilepsy is critical for diagnosis and management. Current methods for assessing behavioral responsiveness are characterized by substantial variation, subjectivity, and limited reliability and reproducibility in ambulatory and epilepsy monitoring unit settings. In this study, we aimed to develop and implement a novel mobile platform for deployment of automated responsiveness testing in epilepsy—the ARTiE Watch—to facilitate standardized, objective assessments of behavioral responsiveness during and after seizures.We prospectively recruited patients admitted to the epilepsy monitoring units for diagnostic evaluation and long‐term video‐electroencephalographic monitoring at Mayo Clinic and Yale New Haven Hospital. Participants wore the ARTiE Watch, a smartwatch paired with custom smartphone software integrated with cloud infrastructure allowing for remote activation of standardized assessment on the participants' smartwatches. The assessment consisted of 18 command prompts that test behavioral responsiveness across motor, language, and memory domains. Upon visually identifying an electrographic seizure during EMU monitoring, the BrainRISE platform was used to deploy the ARTiE Watch behavioral testing sequence. Responsiveness scoring was conducted on smartwatch files.Eighteen of 56 participants had a total of 39 electrographic seizures assessed with the ARTiE Watch. The 18 subjects with ARTiE Watch‐tested seizures had a total of 67 baseline (interictal) ARTiE Watch tests collected for analysis. The analysis showed distinct ARTiE Watch behavioral responsiveness phenotypes: (1) decreased responsiveness across all ARTiE Watch commands during seizure (ictal–postictal) periods compared (to baseline (p < .0001), (2) decreased responsiveness in bilateral tonic–clonic seizures compared to baseline (p < .0001) and compared to focal seizures (p < .0001), and (3) decreased responsiveness during focal impaired awareness seizures compared to baseline (p < .0001) and compared to focal aware seizures (p < .001).ARTiE Watch behavioral testing deployed utilizing a mobile cloud‐based platform is feasible and can provide standardized, objective behavioral responsiveness assessments during seizures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of health communication on social media, the mechanisms by which social media affect health information exchange have received less than adequate investigation. By integrating the lenses of affordance and social support, this study examines the effect of social media affordances on health information exchange, with a particular focus on the mediation effect of social support and the boundary condition of health consciousness. Results of an online survey indicated that the affordances of information accessibility and metavoicing are positively related to both general and experiential informational support. Moreover, the affordance of association is positively related to experiential informational support and emotional support. Additionally, three types of social support have positive effects on health information exchange, and health consciousness positively moderates the effect of experiential informational support on health information exchange. This study enriches existing literature by revealing the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between social media affordances and health information exchange. Furthermore, it provides new insights for practitioners to promote health information exchange on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polar angle asymmetries (PAAs), the differences in perceptual experiences and performance across different regions of the visual field are present in various paradigms and tasks of visual perception. Currently, research in this area is sparse, particularly regarding the influence of PAAs during perceptual illusions, highlighting a gap in visual cognition studies. We aim to fill this gap by measuring PAAs across the visual field during an illusion applied to test conscious vision widely. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is an illusion when a peripheral target disappears from consciousness as the result of a continuously moving background pattern. During MIB we separately measured the average disappearance time of peripheral targets in eight equidistant visual field positions. Our results indicate a significant variation in MIB disappearance times and frequencies as a function of target location. Specifically, we found shorter and fewer disappearances along the cardinal compared to oblique directions, and along the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian. Our results suggest specific consistencies between visual field asymmetries and conscious visual perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial ears with intelligence, which can sensitively detect sound—a variant of pressure—and generate consciousness and logical decision‐making abilities, hold great promise to transform life. However, despite the emerging flexible sensors for sound detection, most success is limited to very simple phonemes, such as a couple of letters or words, probably due to the lack of device sensitivity and capability. Herein, the construction of ultrasensitive artificial eardrums enabling intelligent song recognition is reported. This strategy employs novel geometric engineering of sensing units in the soft microstructure array (to significantly reduce effective modulus) along with complex song recognition exploration leveraging machine learning algorithms. Unprecedented pressure sensitivity (6.9 × 103 kPa−1) is demonstrated in a sensor with a hollow pyramid architecture with porous slants. The integrated device exhibits unparalleled (exceeding by 1–2 orders of magnitude compared with reported benchmark samples) sound detection sensitivity, and can accurately identify 100% (for training set) and 97.7% (for test set) of a database of the segments from 77 songs varying in language, style, and singer. Overall, the results highlight the outstanding performance of the hollow‐microstructure‐based sensor, indicating its potential applications in human–machine interaction and wearable acoustical technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews Mattia Riccardi's book "Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology," which distinguishes between philosophical psychology and moral psychology in Nietzsche's work. Riccardi explores Nietzsche's views on cognition, affectivity, consciousness, and their relation to moral psychology. The book delves into Nietzsche's philosophical psychology, historical context, and engagement with other scholars, offering nuanced interpretations that challenge traditional views. Riccardi's analysis of Nietzsche's views on consciousness and affectivity prompts critical engagement and raises questions about the nature of emotional responses and their relationship to the external world. [Extracted from the article]

The topic of animal ethics has advanced in tourism studies since its inception in 2000, based on a diverse range of studies on species involvement, types of uses and contexts, level of engagement, states of animals, and theoretical perspectives. While there is still considerable scope to amplify research on animal-based tourism, a gap exists in tourism pedagogy amidst the field's emphasis on a new expanding consciousness platform. We review the depth of existing scholarship on animal ethics in tourism and develop an agenda for advancing animal ethics pedagogy for the future. Our intent is to issue a call to action for curriculum committees, programme administrators, and educators to recognise and act on this critical moral domain in tourism education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a reliable retrospective link to early-life traumatic stress, dissociation has been formulated as a pathology of abnormal socioemotional development. Dissociation hence should be identifiable and diagnosable in childhood. This study aimed to address the extent to which current formulation and diagnostic criteria of adult dissociation is applicable to children. This case study documented and analyzed the potentially dissociative experiences and behaviors in a 11-year-old boy from a residential facility accommodating children from high-risk families. The first-person account from the child client about his potentially dissociative experiences and the observations of the clinician witnessing the targeted behaviors were documented, revealing a symptom profile similar to adult dissociation. Dissociation disrupted multiple domains of typically integrated mental functioning including memory, consciousness, and the sense of self. The child client presented unusual forgetfulness that was observed by others, while the child himself was able to describe experiences involving gaps in consciousness and a fragmented and disconnected sense of self. This case study renders support for the current formulation of dissociative pathology and its applicability to high-risk cases in early developmental stages. This finding also indicates the importance of trauma-informed care in child residential settings. With gentle guiding prompts, children are able to recognize and articulate unusual experiences, facilitating the early identification of dissociation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractMediums are individuals who claim to communicate with deceased persons or non-material beings. Rigorous studies have reported that mediums can provide accurate anomalous information (i.e. information not obtained through the conventional senses or inferential reasoning). This paper reviews the evidence about these claims and explores the main conventional explanatory hypotheses: fraud, sitter’s gullibility and wishful thinking, lucky chance, medium’s mental disorder, and involuntary personification of the unconscious mind. Additionally, we examine non-conventional explanations, specifically the hypothesis of the mind beyond the brain, highlighting the types of evidence that mediumship studies provide to support the existence of a mind independent of the physical brain. Through a critical analysis of both conventional and non-conventional explanations, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of mediumship and its potential implications for our comprehension of consciousness and the mind-brain problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining "dance" is challenging, because many distinct classes of human movement may be considered dance in a broad sense. Although the most obvious category is rhythmic dancing to a musical beat, other categories of expressive movement such as dance improvisation, pantomime, tai chi, or Japanese butoh suggest that a more inclusive conception of human dance is needed. Here we propose that a specific type of conscious awareness plays an overarching role in most forms of expressive movement and can be used to define dance (in the broad sense). We can briefly summarize this broader notion of dance as "mindful movement." However, to make this conception explicit and testable, we need an empirically verifiable characterization of "mindful movement." We propose such a characterization in terms of predictive coding and procedural learning theory: mindful movement involves a "suspension" of automatization. When first learning a new motor skill, we are highly conscious of our movements, and this is reflected in neural activation patterns. As skill increases, automatization and overlearning occurs, involving a progressive suppression of conscious awareness. Overlearned, habitual movement patterns become mostly unconscious, entering consciousness only when mistakes or surprising outcomes occur. In mindful movement, this automatization process is essentially inverted or suspended, reactivating previously unconscious details of movement in the conscious workspace, and crucially enabling a renewed aesthetic attention to such details. This wider perspective on dance has important implications for potential animal analogs of human dance and leads to multiple lines of experimental exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aesthetic experience is an altered state of consciousness characterized by a detached absorption in an aesthetic object; it is a pleasant—sometimes ecstatic—liberation from the self and its agenda. I briefly review perceptual-cognitive and affective approaches used by psychologists to understand the phenomenon and suggest the need for a volitional perspective. To illustrate the nature and scope of aesthetic experience, I discuss nine varieties, elicited by different qualities in objects and evoking distinctive responses in perceivers. Over centuries, aesthetic devices have been developed that induce the aesthetic state by manipulating such psychological mechanisms as attention, appraisal, and empathy. I propose explanations for how several important devices operate, and why they are particularly effective in individuals high in the personality trait of Openness to Experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary definition of mental imagery is characterized by two aspects: a sensory representation that resembles, but does not result from, perception, and an associated subjective experience. Neuroimaging demonstrated imagery-related sensory representations in primary visual cortex (V1) that show striking parallels to perception. However, it remains unclear whether these representations always reflect subjective experience or if they can be dissociated from it. We addressed this question by comparing sensory representations and subjective imagery among visualizers and aphantasics, the latter with an impaired ability to experience imagery. Importantly, to test for the presence of sensory representations independently of the ability to generate imagery on demand , we examined both spontaneous and voluntary imagery forms. Using multivariate fMRI, we tested for decodable sensory representations in V1 and subjective visual imagery reports that occurred either spontaneously (during passive listening of evocative sounds) or in response to the instruction to voluntarily generate imagery of the sound content (always while blindfolded inside the scanner). Among aphantasics, V1 decoding of sound content was at chance during voluntary imagery, and lower than in visualizers, but it succeeded during passive listening, despite them reporting no imagery. In contrast, in visualizers, decoding accuracy in V1 was greater in voluntary than spontaneous imagery (while being positively associated with the reported vividness of both imagery types). Finally, for both conditions, decoding in precuneus was successful in visualizers but at chance for aphantasics. Together, our findings show that V1 representations can be dissociated from subjective imagery, while implicating a key role of precuneus in the latter. • A novel paradigm was used to elicit spontaneous and voluntary imagery using sounds • V1 representations of sounds were found in aphantasics despite subjective imagery absence • Aphantasics and visualizers differed in V1 for voluntary but not for spontaneous imagery • Precuneus emerged as higher-level correlate of subjective imagery presence Cabbai et al. test whether sensory representations in primary visual cortex (V1) can be dissociated from subjective mental imagery. They find that V1 representations can occur without subjective experience in aphantasics during a task designed to elicit spontaneous imagery. Their findings also implicate precuneus in conscious imagery experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Episodic memories are experienced as belonging to a self that persists in time. We review evidence concerning the nature of human episodic memory and of the sense of self and how these emerge during development, proposing that the younger child experiences a persistent self that supports a subjective experience of remembering. We then explore recent research in cognitive architectures for robotics that has investigated the possibility of forms of synthetic episodic and autobiographical memory. We show that recent advances in generative modeling can support an understanding of the emergence of self and of episodic memory, and that cognitive architectures which include a language capacity are showing progress towards the construction of a narrative self with autobiographical memory capabilities for robots. We conclude by considering the prospects for a more complete model of mental time travel in robotics and the implications of this modeling work for understanding human episodic memory and the self in time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Tulving's influential 1985 article 'Memory and consciousness', it has become traditional to think of autonoetic consciousness as necessary for episodic memory. This paper questions this claim. Specifically, it argues that the construct of autonoetic consciousness lacks validity and that, even if it was valid, it would still not be necessary for episodic memory. The paper ends with a proposal to go back to a functional/computational characterization of episodic memory in which its characteristic phenomenology is a contingent feature of the retrieval process and, as a result, open to empirical scrutiny. The proposal also dovetails with recent taxonomies of memory that are independent of conscious awareness and suggests strategies to evaluate within- and between-individual variability in the conscious experience of episodic memories in human and non-human agents. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's episodic future-thinking is typically assessed using experimental tasks that measure whether children select an item with future utility. Although these tasks—inspired by Tulving's seminal 'spoon test' (Tulving E. 2005 Episodic memory and autonoesis: uniquely human? In The missing link in cognition: origins of self-reflective consciousness [eds HS Terrace, J Metcalfe], pp. 3–56. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161564.001.0001])—are passed around age 4, they tell us little about the functional significance of children's episodic future-thinking in their day-to-day lives. We highlight how a naturalistic approach can shed light on this issue, and present a small study where we recruited mothers to report on their children's (N = 12, 3- and 4-year-olds and 6- and 7-year-olds) future-thinking over a 7-day period. We used a thematic analysis to understand why children express future thoughts and derived the following themes: (1) expressing future desires and/or intentions, (2) future-oriented information-seeking, (3) connecting present actions with future outcomes, and (4) predicting future mental/physiological states. We compare these themes with recent accounts of the functional significance of future-thinking in adults and conclude that children largely express their future-thinking verbally to request information or support from their parent—likely because they do not yet possess enough control/autonomy to independently act for their own future. Our findings both complement and extend an experimental approach and further elucidate the functional significance of mental time travel in children. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present two ontological problems for the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness 4.0: what we call the (i) the intrinsicality 2.0 problem, and (ii) the engineering problem. These problems entail that truly existing, conscious entities can depend on, and be engineered from, entities that do not objectively exist, which is problematic: if something does not exist in objective reality (i.e., in itself, independently of another entity's consciousness), then it seems that it cannot be part of the material basis and determinants of other entities that do exist on their own. We argue that the core origin of these problems lies in IIT's equation between true existence and phenomenal existence (consciousness), and the corresponding ontological exclusion of non-conscious physical entities (i.e., extrinsic entities) from objective reality. In short, these two problems seem to show that IIT should reconsider the ontological status of these extrinsic entities, because they need to exist objectively to account for the ontological implications of the scenarios we present here, which are permitted by the operational framework of the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Shamanism is a spiritual tradition in which trance practitioners deliberately modify their state of consciousness to seemingly interact with an invisible world to resolve their community members' problems. This review aims to provide a multidisciplinary overview of scientific research on shamanic trance. Methods: The search was performed using PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Twenty-seven articles were found to be eligible, and their data were classified into four dimensions, namely, a) phenomenology, b) psychology, c) neuro-physiological functions, and d) clinical applications. Results: These studies suggest that these trances are non-pathological, different from normal states of consciousness in terms of phenomenology and neurophysiology, and influenced by multiple personal and environmental variables. Furthermore, while trances may offer therapeutic potential, their scope should be approached cautiously, underscoring the need for rigorous studies to assess the effectiveness of shamanic approaches for complementary therapies. Conclusion: Overall, shamanic trance and its potential benefits remain an intriguing and multifaceted area of scientific study, offering insights into the intersections of consciousness, spirituality, and possibly therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Few formal instruments exist to assess the communicative competence of patients hospitalized in intensive care units (ICUs). This can limit interventions by health professionals. Aims: To map the categories and instruments for assessing the communicative competence of adult patients with minimal response in ICUs. Methods & Procedures: A scoping review was carried out following the Joanna Briggs Institute protocol between February and March 2022 and using the MEDLINE (PubMed), Scopus, Scielo, Business Source Complete (via EBSCOhost), Academic Search Complete (via EBSCOhost) and Web of Science databases, in Portuguese, English and Spanish. Main Contribution: Eight studies met the inclusion criteria. The different communication and pain assessment protocols covered awareness, cognition, sensory capacity, motor capacity, language, speech and literacy. Conclusions & Implications: The present review offers a starting point for the construction of a formal assessment instrument to enable clinicians to implement an augmentative or alternative communication system (AACS) for the voluntary, independent and active participation of patients. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject: Patients in ICUs are subject to various forms of treatment and continuous and intensive monitoring, compromising their capacity to communicate and actively participate (e.g., sharing symptoms and making decisions). Although there is some awareness of their disadvantage in such a regard, few protocols of assessment of communicative competence have been adapted to patients with a minimum response. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge: The present review highlights different protocols for the assessment of communication and pain. They include the following categories: awareness, sensory capacity, auditory and visual acuity, positioning and motor capacity, language, speech, and literacy. The review offers a starting point for the construction of a formal assessment instrument encompassing the aforementioned categories, along with duly validated guidelines for its application. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?: Our formal assessment instrument takes into account the need to adapt to different patient profiles. It is hoped that it will provide speech therapists and other health professionals with the information required to implement an AACS in which patients participate actively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dans cet article, nous avons pour objectif de décrire un modèle interdisciplinaire de psychothérapie assistée par psychédéliques (PAP) que nous avons développé dans un cadre institutionnel aux hôpitaux universitaires de Genève. La psychothérapie assistée par psychédéliques (PAP) est une approche psychothérapeutique exploitant l'altération de l'état de conscience induite par une substance psychédélique. Cette approche, longtemps négligée pour des raisons historiques non scientifiques, fait de nouveau l'objet de recherches grâce à des résultats préliminaires importants concernant son potentiel thérapeutique dans divers troubles mentaux. En Suisse, depuis 2014, il est possible d'obtenir des autorisations médicales exceptionnelles pour traiter des patients avec du LSD et de la psilocybine. Nous soutenons que l'altération de la conscience induite par les psychédéliques est un outil thérapeutique puissant qui pourrait être développé pour appuyer la psychothérapie traditionnelle basée sur le dialogue afin de relancer le processus psychothérapeutique. In this article, we aim to describe an interdisciplinary model for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (PAP) that we have developed at the Geneva University Hospitals, in an institutional setting. Our model integrates the collaborative efforts of psychiatrists, psychologists, and nurses establishing a structured framework for administering PAP in a safe, controlled, and standardized manner. Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (PAP) is a psychotherapeutic approach that utilizes the profound alteration of the state of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances to enhance therapeutic outcomes. This innovative approach, which has been neglected due to historical biases rather than empirical evidence, is now experiencing a renewed interest among clinicians. Contemporary research, equipped with advanced methodologies and a rigorous scientific approach, is showing significant therapeutic potential for a range of mental health disorders. In Switzerland, the legal framework authorizes the medicinal use since 2014 for exceptional authorizations for the medicinal use of LSD and psilocybin for therapeutic purposes, under strict regulations. We provide a comprehensive description of the PAP protocol implemented at the Geneva University Hospitals, beginning with its inception in September 2020. Our methodological outline includes the administrative and clinical selection criteria for patient eligibility; the preparatory sessions designed to introduce the patients with psychoeducation interventions and the analysis of intention and therapeutical objectives; the controlled administration of psychedelics in a supportive environment; and the integration sessions that follow psychedelic experiences. Our protocol emphasizes safety, ethical considerations, and the importance of a supportive therapeutic relationship throughout the process. We also describe questionnaires we use to qualify and assess the alteration in the state of consciousness, namely The Five Dimension Altered States of Consciousness (5AD-ASC) and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). Since the start of the program in September 2020 and up to February 2024, a total of 224 personal authorizations (114 LSD, 110 Psilocybin) have been issued to the Geneva University Hospital PAP team, for a total of 396 individual sessions. The core argument presented in this article is that the psychedelic-induced alteration of consciousness is a novel therapeutic tool, which works as a potent catalyst that can be synergistically combined with traditional dialogue-based psychotherapy. This combination has the potential to support the psychotherapeutic processes and enable breakthroughs in cases where conventional therapy has reached its limits. We discuss the implications of this approach, reflecting on both its challenges and its transformative potential within its clinical application. The conclusion of our article is an endorsement of the continued basic and clinical research on PAP. By presenting a detailed framework of the PAP process, including its preparatory, experiential, and integrative phases, we advocate for a structured and scientifically grounded exploration of its therapeutic efficacy. Our conclusion calls for a broader acceptance and integration of PAP within clinical practice, provided it is underpinned by ongoing research, ethical practice, and institutional support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jamie Kruse of smudge studio is interviewed by co-editor, Valerie Triggs, in this special issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, regarding smudge studio's site-specific project, OBSERVATORY. Kruse explains OBSERVATORY as a geo-cosmo field station workshop and tea hut where contemporary practices of tea drinking are offered to guests for experiencing tea's distinctive expressions of the forces of sun, earth, season, and cultural wisdom. Kruse discuss the ways in which tea, as an object, has pedagogic potential for reweaving human consciousness and imagination in relation to the cosmos as well as how it has become a personified force for smudge studio's ongoing collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the scene of 'The Great Resignation' in the USA and UK (2021-2023) as its starting point, this paper explores how love - with its promises and disappointments, its nurture and its destruction - is activated in relation to the ideologies of work that prop up capitalism's world. Through critical engagement with the popular maxims of 'do what you love' and 'work won't love you back', we trace the weave of love and work in the context of predominantly (but not only) high-status, employment-based work within the unevenly gendered, racialised and sexualised labour markets in the USA and the UK. We show how the call to love work or to recognise work's lack, while ostensibly antithetical, both offer a key to understanding the promise and problem of work's love. We argue that work's love is productive of the capitalist world and the violences that accompany it and foreclose alternative possibilities. Through a critique of Arendt's theorisation of the world, we conclude by showing how love and work are central to geographical imaginaries of worldliness, and to both the rejection and possibility of other worlds after (or within) colonial-capitalism's abolition. Our analysis thus demonstrates how affect and ideology - that is, modes of feeling and forms of consciousness that (re)produce the material relations of capitalism's world - at once reverse into and continue one another in work's love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies have shown that additional language (Lx) learners build on knowledge of previously acquired languages (Ringbom 2007), the natural interaction between languages is rarely exploited in Lx classrooms. This study explores the nature of metalinguistic reflections and crosslinguistic connections during plurilingual consciousness-raising tasks (PluriL-CRT). Three collaborative PluriL-CRTs targeting specific target language (TL) structures were implemented and recorded in a higher education German Lx classroom in Quebec, Canada. Discussions were analyzed for metalinguistic reflections with or without crosslinguistic connections and for levels of analysis (superficial vs. complex) in terms of Form – Meaning – Use (Larsen-Freeman 2014). Analyses suggest that when crosslinguistic connections are made, learners engage in qualitatively different levels of analysis depending on the given TL structures and specific language combinations. The framework of analysis detailed in this study is meant to serve future research into the effects of plurilingual classroom practice that involves metalinguistic reflection on Lx development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]