In this article, we extend psychosocial research methodology by integrating a breaching experiment, influenced by ethnomethodological sociology, with aspects of mindfulness practice, influenced by Buddhist traditions. We offer an empirical investigation of what happens when researcher-participants subtly ‘swim against the stream’ of normative public social conduct in a capital city setting. Our...

In functional neuroimaging, a local decrease in blood flow during an active task, relative to a "resting" baseline, is referred to as task-induced deactivation (TID). TID may occur when resources shift from ongoing, internally generated processing typical of "resting" states to processing required by an exogenous task. We previously found specific brain regions in which TID increased as task pr...

According to William James’ theory of mind (1890), our conscious mental life flows continuously like a stream in which “the transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood” (James, 1983, pp. 233-234). For this reason, he adopted the metaphor of “the stream of consciousness”. The stream is f...

Consciousness, as a complex phenomenon, arises on a hierarchy of human rhythms and their interaction with environment. We present here a model of consciousness represented as a parallel distributed multiprocessing system with rhythmic scanning within a set of active modules. Dominant "gestalt" activity is then created by global exchange of information on "system bus" and by means of common elec...

With the development of Bakhtin's theory of polyphony in literary criticism, the kind of attitude to literary texts has changed, and according to the needs of modern society, this discourse became the focus of attention of thinkers and literary theorists. Polyphony, with its own meta-lingual potentials, brings with it a new approach, a rethinking of the audience, so that the reader can have a n...

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have attempted to discover the processes that underlie conscious visual perception by contrasting ERPs produced by stimuli that are consciously perceived with those that are not. Variability of the proposed ERP correlates of consciousness is considerable: the earliest proposed ERP correlate of consciousness (P1) coincides with sensory processes and the last...

While much that is written about the unity of consciousness does, as Dainton says, traffic in vague metaphors and exaggerated claims, Dainton’s book is a superb example of sober thinking and meticulous attention to detail. Stream of Consciousness can be roughly divided into three projects, projects that are bound together by co-consciousness. In the present context ‘co-consciousness’ refers to ...