A scientific study of consciousness should take into consideration both objective and subjective measures of conscious experiences. To this date, very few studies have tried to integrate third-person data, or data about the neurophysiological correlates of conscious states, with first-person data, or data about subjective experience. Inspired by Morel's invention (Casares, 1940), a literary mac...

Literature in metacognition has systematically rejected the possibility of introspective access to complex cognitive processes. This situation derives from the difficulty of experimentally manipulating cognitive processes while abiding by the two contradictory constraints. First, participants must not be aware of the experimental manipulation, otherwise they run the risk of incorporating their ...

Culture may be thought of as a causal agent that affects the evolutionary process by uniquely human means. Religion, on the other hand, is considered a process of revelation and contains the concept of the "faithful" who receive the message of revelation. Culture permits the "self-conscious evaluation of human possibilities" and therefore presents a device for increasing human control over spec...

Existing accounts of the sense of agency tend to focus on the proximal causal history of the feeling. That is, they explain the sense of agency by describing the cognitive mechanism that causes the sense of agency to be elicited. However, it is possible to elicit an unconscious representation of one's own agency that plays a different role in a cognitive system. I use the "occasionality problem...

Translation of resting-state functional connectivity (FC) magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) applications from human to rodents has experienced growing interest, and bears a great potential in pre-clinical imaging as it enables assessing non-invasively the topological organization of complex FC networks (FCNs) in rodent models under normal and various pathophysiological conditions. However, t...

When I was asked to speak at this meeting and discuss my theory of the basic nature of altered states of consciousness, I was quite pleased with the idea of being able to speak to a group who would be able to give me useful feedback from their expertise on the workings of the mind. Little did I know, however, that I would also be asked to perform a miracle, namely to cover the basic nature of a...

The issue whether consciousness is a graded or an all-or-none phenomenon has been and continues to be a debate. Both contradictory accounts are supported by solid evidence. Starting from a level of processing framework allowing for states of partial awareness, here we further elaborate our view that visual experience, as it is most often investigated in the literature, is both graded and all-or...

The review first discusses componential explanations of automaticity, which specify non/automaticity features (e.g., un/controlled, un/conscious, non/efficient, fast/slow) and their interrelations. Reframing these features as factors that influence processes (e.g., goals, attention, and time) broadens the range of factors that can be considered (e.g., adding stimulus intensity and representatio...