scholarly journals Reduced precision underwrites ego dissolution and therapeutic outcomes under psychedelics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devon Stoliker ◽  
Gary F. Egan ◽  
Adeel Razi

Evidence suggests classic psychedelics reduce the precision of belief updating and enable access to a range of alternate hypotheses that underwrite how we make sense of the world. This process, in the higher cortices, has been postulated to explain the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics for the treatment of internalising disorders. We argue reduced precision also underpins change to consciousness, known as ‘ego dissolution’, and that alterations to consciousness and attention under psychedelics have a common mechanism of reduced precision of Bayesian belief updating. Evidence connecting the role of serotonergic receptors to large-scale connectivity changes in the cortex suggests the precision of Bayesian belief updating may be a mechanism to modify and investigate consciousness and attention.

Epidemiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-324
Author(s):  
Juan M. Banda ◽  
Ramya Tekumalla ◽  
Guanyu Wang ◽  
Jingyuan Yu ◽  
Tuo Liu ◽  
...  

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread worldwide, an unprecedented amount of open data is being generated for medical, genetics, and epidemiological research. The unparalleled rate at which many research groups around the world are releasing data and publications on the ongoing pandemic is allowing other scientists to learn from local experiences and data generated on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a need to integrate additional data sources that map and measure the role of social dynamics of such a unique worldwide event in biomedical, biological, and epidemiological analyses. For this purpose, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 1.12 billion tweets, growing daily, related to COVID-19 chatter generated from 1 January 2020 to 27 June 2021 at the time of writing. This data source provides a freely available additional data source for researchers worldwide to conduct a wide and diverse number of research projects, such as epidemiological analyses, emotional and mental responses to social distancing measures, the identification of sources of misinformation, stratified measurement of sentiment towards the pandemic in near real time, among many others.


ICR Journal ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-100
Author(s):  
Shahino Mah Abdullah

The most frequent transboundary haze in the world takes place in Southeast Asia. It is usually caused by land-use changes, open burning, peat combustion, wildfires, and other farming activities. Serious haze occurred in 1983, 1997, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015 and 2016, originating from large-scale forest fires in western Sumatra and southern Kalimantan, Indonesia. It caused adverse effects to locals as well as neighbouring countries, affecting their health, economy, agriculture, and biodiversity. Among the serious effects of haze are increased respiratory-related mortality due to toxic airborne particles, jet crashs and ship collisions due to restricted visibility, reduction of crop growth rate due to limited solar radiation, and extinction of endangered primates due to habitat loss. Neighbouring countries like Malaysia and Singapore sometimes have to close schools to prevent people from being exposed to air pollution, and its consequent respiratory ailments.  


1996 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna L. Hoffman ◽  
Thomas P. Novak

The authors address the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Their approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e., national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. They introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium, propose a structural model of consumer navigation behavior in a CME that incorporates the notion of flow, and examine a series of research issues and marketing implications that follow from the model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Michael Winkelman

This introduction to the special issue reviews research that supports the hypothesis that psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, were central features in the development of religion. The greater response of the human serotonergic system to psychedelics than is the case for chimpanzees’ serotonergic receptors indicates that these substances were environmental factors that affected hominin evolution. These substances also contributed to the evolution of ritual capacities, shamanism, and the associated alterations of consciousness. The role of psilocybin mushrooms in the ancient evolution of human religions is attested to fungiform petroglyphs, rock artifacts, and mythologies from all major regions of the world. This prehistoric mycolatry persisted into the historic era in the major religious traditions of the world, which often left evidence of these practices in sculpture, art, and scriptures. This continuation of entheogenic practices in the historical world is addressed in the articles here. But even through new entheogenic combinations were introduced, complex societies generally removed entheogens from widespread consumption, restricted them in private and exclusive spiritual practices of the leaders, and often carried out repressive punishment of those who engaged in entheogenic practices.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 889-896
Author(s):  
Norio Maki ◽  
◽  
Laurie A. Johnson ◽  
◽  

The role of recovery organization management is important, and organizations in various forms have been established internationally to aid recovery from large-scale disasters. This paper clarifies three types of recovery organizations by analyzing them in various countries based on disaster organization theory. Furthermore, it analyzes recovery organizations that operated after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan. It then examines the operations of recovery organizations during large-scale earthquakes that may lead to a national crisis by comparing recovery organizations internationally. Finally, this paper clarifies the necessity of “emergent” organizations.


IFLA Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 034003522110541
Author(s):  
Simon Wakeling ◽  
Jane Garner ◽  
Philip Hider ◽  
Hamid Jamali ◽  
Jessie Lymn ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 crisis has had a significant impact on public libraries around the world. In Australia, almost all public libraries experienced some period of building closure, requiring libraries to adapt their services and delivery models. This article reports findings from a large-scale survey of public library managers in Australia, which was conducted in August 2020. In particular, it presents the results of a thematic analysis of the participants’ free-text responses to open questions asked as part of the survey. This analysis reveals important insights relating to responses to library closures, staffing issues, new and expanded services and programmes, relationships with parent bodies, and the role of public libraries during the crisis and beyond. While public libraries are perceived by managers to have been agile and adaptable, and to have utilised technology effectively, the findings clearly demonstrate the value to users of library buildings, with important consequences for understanding the role of public libraries.


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Pluckhahn ◽  
Victor D. Thompson

In the archaeology of the American Southeast, the Woodland period (from around 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1050) is not conventionally understood as an interval marked by significant “firsts.” But it was marked by a dramatic change in the way people related to one another, as indicated by the earliest widespread appearance of sedentary villages, often associated with large-scale public works like mounds of earth and shell. Crystal River and Roberts Island are examples of these “early villages,” a term archaeologists have used to describe similar societies around the world, typically in reference to societies making a transition from hunting and gathering to farming. However, the people of Crystal River and Roberts Island faced many of the same social and ecological pressures. Early villages are important for what they can tell us about the role of cooperation, collective action, and conflict in the historical process and development of larger and more complex societies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ester Pollack ◽  
Sigurd Allern

Transparency International’s yearly Corruption Perceptions Index ranks Scandinavia as one of the least corrupt regions in the world. However, during the past decades, large Scandinavian corporations in the telecommunications, oil and defence industries have – in their struggle for business contracts in other countries – been involved in several large-scale bribery scandals. There has also been a growing range of corruption cases in the Swedish and Norwegian public sectors. In many of these cases, investigative journalists have played a crucial role in the disclosure of corruption, sometimes cooperating across media organisations and countries, demonstrating the importance of journalism as a public good for democracy. In this article, we explore, discuss and analyse the work of and methods used by investigative journalists in revealing large-scale corruption related to the expansion of Nordic telecom companies in Uzbekistan.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-10
Author(s):  
A.P. BOCHKOVSKYI

The article analyzes a semantic meaning of the term "sustainable development" followed by its proper interpretation. It has been determined that in recent years, the number of natural and man-made disasters has increased rapidly due to the processes of technogenic environment expansion, the active growth of our planet population and large-scale urbanization. It is established that in recent decades the number of major man-made disasters consistently exceeds the number of natural ones. In the structure of man-made disasters (among industrial, transport and mixed), the largest number of victims and material damage were induced by industrial disasters. Definition of the main principle of sustainable development was interpreted. It is concluded that trends of the modern human development model directly contradict the above principle. The known studies were reviewed concerning directions of the humanity’s sustainable development concept realization globally and in Ukraine, as well as to the role of labor protection and industrial safety within the above process. The evolutionary development of labor protection has been provided as a science from ancient times to the present, as well as the contribution of great scientists to the development of labor protection and industrial safety. Modern trends of professional risks and man-made hazards in Ukraine, in particular, in the flour grinding industry and the world are analyzed. Based on the analysis, it was determined that currently a particular danger is the comprehensive application (availability, trafficking) of chemicals in all without exception workplaces feed mills, grain mills, flour mills and other enterprises of our country, as well as the large-scale use of pesticides of the first and second class of hazard. Another concern is the fact that modern personal protective equipment is not able to protect people from fine particles of chemicals (size 1 – 100 nanometers (nm), widely applied in modern industries thanks to the comprehensive use of nanotechnology in the world. It has been established that 4.4% of world stocks of unsuitable for use pesticides are accumulated in the territory of Ukraine. An increase in the number of chemicals in the air of the working area during the technological processes at the enterprises of the flour-grinding industry has caused 86% of all deaths associated with professional human activities. The leading role of labor protection as a necessary element of ensuring the implementation of the sustainable development concept in the world is indicated. Main modern problems of labor protection development as a science in Ukraine are defined and promising ways of their solution are offered.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloé Germaine ◽  
Benjamin Bowman

In this essay, Chloé Germaine Buckley and Benjamin Bowman discuss the School Strike for Climate movement. Rather than consider the strikes as a protest movement for a large-scale shift in climate policy, they suggest viewing them as a form of global cultural exchange. They highlight the role of three themes to make this case: 1. the role of young people’s positionalities in building relationships and global solidarities;2. young people’s repertoires beyond attempting to shift climate policy into wider civic activity such as intergenerational care or mental health support;3. the functioning of the strikes as a polyphonic ‘text’ that invites dialogue, incorporating a multitude of voices in a variety of forms. In their essay, Buckley and Bowman interpret the efforts of young people not only as a protest against the world as it is today, but as a process that envisions the world as it could be, with all the struggles that come with bringing this view into being. The authors draw on a range of materials produced by young people, from informal protest signs to songs.


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