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Category: Musings

Is Cannabis Psychedelic?

Get The Article Psychology Today Article Neuropsychopharmacology Article Is Cannabis Psychedlic? Neural complexity is increased after low doses of LSD, but not moderate to high doses of oral THC or methamphetamine Cite This Work APA MLA Bibtex Murray, C. H., Frohlich, J., Haggarty, C. J., Tare, I., Lee, R., & De Wit, H. (2024). Neural […]

Revisiting Animal Consciousness

The New York Declaration (released April 19, 2024) Last month, a prominent group of 39 cross-disciplinary scientists released The New York Declaration of Animal Consciousness, acknowledging (1) the “strong scientific support” of conscious experience in birds and mammals; (2) “the realistic possibility of conscious experience” in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates […]

Why Do We Experience Chills?

Get The Article Article Psychogenic Shivers: why we get the chills when we aren’t cold  Article Cite This Work APA MLA Chicago Harvard Vancouver Schoeller, F. (2021, April 8). Psychogenic shivers: Why we get the chills when we aren’t cold: Aeon ideas. Psychogenic shivers: why we get the chills when we aren’t cold. Retrieved from https://aeon.co/ideas/psychogenic-shivers-why-we-get-the-chills-when-we-arent-cold […]

The Consciousness Compass

The Consciousness Compass Edited by GPT 4. Illustrated by MidJourney. What does this mean? See Afterword below. What the hell is ‘a common denominator of consciousness’”? you ask me. We’re in a café in the city on a rainy day. You’ve just opened my new paper on your laptop, recently published in the peer-reviewed Nature Portfolio journal Biology […]

Visiting the “World Behind the World”

I’m a bit late to the party–it’s hard to shop for English language books here in Germany–but I finally read Erik Hoel’s 2023 book on the science of consciousness: The World Behind the World. Well, this world between the book covers is fantastic. I’m not here so much to review Hoel’s book–which anyone interested in the […]

Interview with Erik Hoel, neuroscientist and author

In my last post, I shared my reflections on Erik Hoel’s wonderful book on the science of consciousness, The World Behind the World. As a follow up, he was kind enough to answer my questions over email about both his book and his very exciting career. Erik was a professor at Tuft’s University until 2023, when he […]

How floating in darkness challenges our concept of the self

Excerpt adapted from Buddha in the Float Tank What is a float tank? What does it teach us about perception, selfhood, and out-of-body experiences? The tank is a lightproof, soundproof chamber filled with saline water. This solution, saturated with Epson salt, is so dense that one floats effortlessly, with no muscle tension. What’s more, the water […]

In Pursuit of a ‘Neuroprint’ for Neuroscience-Based Personalization

The Challenge of Individual Variation Just as fingerprints represent multivariate patterns with sufficient uniqueness and stability to serve as forensic evidence in criminal proceedings, our brains harbor distinctive topographies of response to the world around us. These neural landscapes, shaped by genetics, experience, and countless moments of conscious and unconscious processing, hold the key to […]

Can Aesthetic Chills Make Us More Generous? A Dictator Game Study

For one of our recent studies, we brought participants to the lab where they were presented with a series of auditory stimuli proven to cause chills in over 2/3 of the population while we recorded their neural and physiological data. Participants then completed tasks examining their post-intervention feelings, perspective-taking, and reactions to moral dilemmas, as well […]