Mental Experience

2021 ◽  
pp. 289-308
Author(s):  
Robert W. Thatcher ◽  
E. Roy John
Keyword(s):  
Mental Experience

scholarly journals Channeling: A Non-pathological Possession and Dissociative Identity Experience or Something Else?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciano Pederzoli ◽  
Patrizio Tressoldi ◽  
Helané Wahbeh
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Criteria ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Dsm 5 ◽  
Mental Experience

AbstractChanneling experiences are often compared with Dissociative Trance/Possession Disorders and Dissociative Identity Disorders and more recent diagnostic criteria presented in the DSM 5 and ICD-11. From this comparison, it emerges quite clearly that, for most cases, channeling can either be considered an exceptional non-ordinary mental experience or a non-pathological Dissociative Trance/Possession experience. If this characterization is valid, the next step is to understand the origin of channeling experiences. Are they an expression of channeler’s unconscious or voluntary mental mechanisms, or real connections with “other discarnate entities”? Given their peculiar characteristics, channeling experiences offer a unique opportunity for a scientific investigation and in particular, the origin of the information received by the channelers.

scholarly journals Bridging Ride and Play Comfort

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Zeliang Zhang ◽  
Kang Xiaohan ◽  
Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid ◽  
Hiroyuki Iida
Keyword(s):  
Physical Performance ◽  
Ride Comfort ◽  
Roller Coaster ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
The Law ◽  
Target Environment ◽  
Rider Comfort ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Suitable Environment ◽  
The Way

The notion of comfort with respect to rides, such as roller coasters, is typically addressed from the perspective of a physical ride, where the convenience of transportation is redefined to minimize risk and maximize thrill. As a popular form of entertainment, roller coasters sit at the nexus of rides and games, providing a suitable environment to measure both mental and physical experiences of rider comfort. In this paper, the way risk and comfort affect such experiences is investigated, and the connection between play comfort and ride comfort is explored. A roller coaster ride simulation is adopted as the target environment for this research, which combines the feeling of being thrill and comfort simultaneously. At the same time, this paper also expands research on roller coaster rides while bridging the rides and games via the analogy of the law of physics, a concept currently known as motion in mind. This study’s contribution involves a roller coaster ride model, which provides an extended understanding of the relationship between physical performance and the mental experience relative to the concept of motion in mind while establishing critical criteria for a comfortable experience of both the ride and play.

Interlude: Interview with Maud Casey

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Tougaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Moral Treatment ◽  
Mental Experience

In this interlude, Tougaw and Casey discuss her novel The Man Who Walked Away in the context of cultural and historical fluctuations in the diagnosis of mental experience as pathology. The conversation ranges through discussions of Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, nineteenth-century theories of “moral treatment,” Casey’s approach to historical fiction and narration, and contemporary debates about diagnosis and labeling of mental illness.

A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex

1990 ◽  
Vol 240 (1299) ◽  
pp. 433-451 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Pyramidal Cells ◽  
Neuronal Structure ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Effective Selection ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
Apical Dendrites ◽  
The Brain

A brief introduction to the brain-mind problem leads on to a survey of the neuronal structure of the cerebral cortex. It is proposed that the basic receptive units are the bundles or clusters of apical dendrites of the pyramidal cells of laminae V and III-II as described by Fleischhauer and Peters and their associates. There are up to 100 apical dendrites in these receptive units, named dendrons. Each dendron would have an input of up to 100000 spine synapses. There are about 40 million dendrons in the human cerebral cortex. A study of the influence of mental events on the brain leads to the hypothesis that all mental events, the whole of the World 2 of Popper, are composed of mental units, each carrying its own characteristic mental experience. It is further proposed that each mental unit, named psychon, is uniquely linked to a dendron. So the mind-brain problem reduces to the interaction between a dendron and its psychon for all the 40 million linked units. In my 1986 paper ( Proc. R. Soc. Lond . B 227, 411-428) on the mind-brain problem, there was developed the concept that the operation of the synaptic microsites involved displacement of particles so small that they were within range of the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. The psychon-dendron interaction provides a much improved basis for effective selection by a process analogous to a quantal probability field. In the fully developed hypothesis psychons act on dendrons in the whole world of conscious experiences and dendrons act on psychons in all perceptions and memories. It is shown how these interactions involve no violation of the conservation laws. There are great potentialities of these unitary concepts, for example as an explanation of the global nature of a visual experience from moment to moment. It would seem that there can be psychons not linked to dendrons, but only to other psychons, creating what we may call a psychon world.

Feeling of knowing and phenomenal consciousness

1995 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-272
Author(s):  
Tiziana Zalla ◽  
Adriano P. Palma
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Feeling Of Knowing ◽  
Mental Experience

AbstractIn Feeling of Knowing cases, subjects have a form of consciousness about the presence of a content (such as an item of information) without having access to it. If this phenomenon can be correctly interpreted as having to do with consciousness, then there would be a P-conscious mental experience which is dissociated from access.

scholarly journals Maps of subjective feelings

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (37) ◽  
pp. 9198-9203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri Nummenmaa ◽  
Riitta Hari ◽  
Jari K. Hietanen ◽  
Enrico Glerean
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Feeling States ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Bodily Sensation ◽  
Bodily Sensations

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life. We defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis. A total of 1,026 participants took part in online surveys where we assessed (i) for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion, and controllability), (ii) subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings, and (iii) topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling. Neural similarity between a subset of the feeling states was derived from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis database based on the data from 9,821 brain-imaging studies. All feelings were emotionally valenced and the saliency of bodily sensations correlated with the saliency of mental experiences associated with each feeling. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction revealed five feeling clusters: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states and illnesses, and homeostatic states. Organization of the feeling space was best explained by basic dimensions of emotional valence, mental experiences, and bodily sensations. Subjectively felt similarity of feelings was associated with basic feeling dimensions and the topography of the corresponding bodily sensations. These findings reveal a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.

scholarly journals Drawing as a Facilitating Approach When Conducting Research Among Children

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 160940691882255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Søndergaard ◽  
Susanne Reventlow
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Socioeconomically Disadvantaged ◽  
Future Health ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
The Family ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
The Way

Using drawings to bridge the communication barriers between adults and children, this article looks at examples of fieldwork with socioeconomically disadvantaged young families in Denmark with a parent who has multiple diagnoses. Studies suggest a link between a disadvantaged socioeconomic childhood and a predisposition to illness and disease in later life and that children of ill parents tend to be ill more often and be lonelier than their peers with healthy parents. These findings are underpinned by other studies showing how children’s social relations are vital to how they experience childhood and for their current and future health profile. Based on this knowledge, we wanted to study how children from families without a great deal of resources experience their family life but were faced with the dilemma of how to study this phenomenon. Reflection on these experiences shows that drawing is an effective method to facilitate conversations with children about difficult and taboo issues. The method’s strength lies in the way it materializes thoughts and feelings, in the way it generates a sense of “community” between the child and the researcher, which is often challenging in ethnographic research involving children. With their drawings, the children were able to express feelings, sentiments, and experiences that were difficult to articulate in words but not equally difficult to recall as a physical and mental experience or to draw on paper. The drawings illustrated a shared desire among the children who took part in the study for normality, routine, and stability in the family. Please note that we emphasize the importance of including other fieldwork data when interpreting drawings and that it is essential to have a solid contextual understanding of the field.

scholarly journals Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 1195-1217
Author(s):  
Lassi A. Liikkanen ◽  
Kelly Jakubowski
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Music Cognition ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Personality Factors ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Musical Imagery ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Research Themes ◽  
Extensive Literature Search

AbstractInvoluntary musical imagery (INMI) refers to a conscious mental experience of music that occurs without deliberate efforts to initiate or sustain it. This experience often consists of the repetition of a short fragment of a melody, colloquially called an “earworm.” Here, we present the first comprehensive, qualitative review of published empirical research on INMI to date. We performed an extensive literature search and discovered, in total, 47 studies from 33 peer-reviewed articles that met the inclusion criteria for the review. In analyzing the content of these studies, we identified four major research themes, which concern the phenomenology, dynamics, individual differences, and musical features of INMI. The findings answer many questions of scientific interest—for instance, what is typical in terms of INMI frequency, duration, and content; which factors influence INMI onset; and whether demographic and personality factors can explain individual differences in susceptibility and responses to INMI. This review showcases INMI as a well-established phenomenon in light of a substantial body of empirical studies that have accumulated consistent results. Although the populations under study show an unfavorable bias towards Western, educated participants, the evidence depicts INMI as a universal psychological phenomenon, the possible function of which we do not yet fully understand. The concluding section introduces several suggestions for future research to expand on the topic.

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