Contemporary psychiatry faces serious challenges because it has failed to incorporate accumulated knowledge from basic neuroscience, neurophilosophy, and brain–mind relation studies. As a consequence, it has limited explanatory power, and effective treatment options are hard to come by. A new conceptual framework for understanding mental health based on underlying neurobiological spatial-temporal mechanisms of mental disorders (already gained by the experimental studies) is beginning to emerge.

Rapid advances in the field of neuroimaging techniques including magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), functional MRI (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), voxel based morphomentry (VBM), and optical imaging, have allowed neuroscientists to investigate neural processes in ways that have not been possible until recently. Combining these techniques with advanced analysis procedures during different conditions such as hypnosis, psychiatric and neurological conditions, subliminal stimulation, and psychotropic drugs began transforming the study of neuroscience, ushering a new paradigm that may allow neuroscientists to tackle (...) the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

It is the every person's daily phenomenal experience that conscious states represent their contents as occurring now. Following Droege (2009) we could state that consciousness has a peculiar affinity for presence. Some researchers even argue that conscious awareness necessarily demands that mental content is somehow held “frozen” within a discrete progressive present moment. Thus, phenomenal content seems to be minimally conscious if it is integrated into a single and coherent model of reality during a “virtual window” of presence.

To figure out whether the main empirical question “Is our brain hardwired to believe in and produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive and experience God?” is answered, this paper presents systematic critical review of the positions, arguments and controversies of each side of the neuroscientific-theological debate and puts forward an integral view where the human is seen as a psycho-somatic entity consisting of the multiple levels and dimensions of human existence (physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual reality), allowing (...) consciousness/mind/spirit and brain/body/matter to be seen as different sides of the same phenomenon, neither reducible to each other. The emergence of a form of causation distinctive from physics where mental/conscious agency (a) is neither identical with nor reducible to brain processes and (b) does exert “downward” causal influence on brain plasticity and the various levels of brain functioning is discussed. This manuscript also discusses the role of cognitive processes in religious experience and outlines what can neuroscience offer for study of religious experience and what is the significance of this study for neuroscience, clinicians, theology and philosophy. A methodological shift from “explanation” to “description” of religious experience is suggested. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion between theologians, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)

The goal of this work is to compile the basic components for the construction of an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness that meets the standards of a fundamental theory. An essential cornerstone of the conceptual framework is the vacuum state of quantum electrodynamics which, contrary to the classical notion of the vacuum, can be viewed as a vibrant ocean of energy, termed zero-point field (ZPF). Being the fundamental substrate mediating the electromagnetic force, the ubiquitous ZPF constitutes the ultimate bedrock of (...) all electromagnetic phenomena. In particular, resonant interaction with the ZPF is critical for understanding rapidly forming, long-range coherent activity patterns that are characteristic of brain dynamics. Assuming that the entire phenomenal color palette is rooted in the vibrational spectrum of the ZPF and that each normal mode of the ZPF is associated with an elementary shade of consciousness, it stands to reason that conscious states are caused by the coupling of the brain to a particular set of normal modes selectively filtered from the full frequency spectrum of the ZPF. From this perspective, the brain is postulated to function as a resonant oscillator that couples to a specific range of ZPF modes, using these modes as a keyboard for the composition of an enormous variety of phenomenal states. Theoretical considerations suggest that the brain-ZPF interface is controlled by altering the concentrations of neurotransmitters, placing the detailed study of the neurotransmitter-ZPF interaction at the center of future research activities. (shrink)

The Operational Architectonics (OA) of brain-mind functioning is a theory that unifies brain and mind through nested and dynamic hierarchy of electromagnetic brain fields. Recently, it has been enriched by concepts from physics like time, space, entropy, and self-organized criticality. This review paper advances OA theory further by delving into the foundations of quantum physics and Eastern metaphysics in relation to mind function. We aim to show that the brain-mind OA is the boundary between and integration point of quantum physics (...) and Eastern metaphysics, and that it may inspire building a richer and more inclusive paradigm of the brain-mind relation, where quantum physics and Eastern metaphysics are inherently intertwined. (shrink)

While the presence or absence of consciousness plays the central role in the moral/ethical decisions when dealing with patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), recently it is criticized as not adequate due to number of reasons, among which are the lack of the uniform definition of consciousness and consequently uncertainty of diagnostic criteria for it, as well as irrelevance of some forms of consciousness for determining a patient’s interests and wishes. In her article, Dr. Specker Sullivan reexamined the meaning of (...) consciousness in the DOC taxonomy and proposed to go away from the routinely used clinical definition of consciousness as “wakeful awareness”, and adopt the meaning that is common in the Eastern tradition which is a form of “pure experience” (Specker Sullivan 2018). She further argued that understanding consciousness as a “pure experience” is ethically relevant for DOC patients. This suggestion is original, novel and important since it preserves the importance of the notion of consciousness for the clinical practice while simultaneously offering an additional ethical tool for the moral decisions in medicine. At the same time, without placing such Eastern notion in the Western tradition it is difficult to see how pure experience could be usefully operationalized to make sense in the clinical practice with DOC patients. It is so because pure experience is a subjective phenomenon which is completely inaccessible in noncommunicative DOC patients and also it does not express behaviorally (Monti et al 2010), therefore some objective-like operationalization is needed. This is why the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions is required to gain the full potential of Dr. Specker Sullivan’s suggestion. We propose that such fusion could be achieved on the basis of the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain-mind functioning (Fingelkurts et al. 2010; 2013a) which suits ideally the purpose due its compatibility with both Western and Eastern traditions of consciousness. (shrink)

The target paper of Schoeller, Perlovsky, and Arseniev is an essential and timely contribution to a current shift of focus in neuroscience aiming to merge neurophysiological, psychological and physical principles in order to build the foundation for the physics of mind. Extending on previous work of Perlovsky et al. and Badre, the authors of the target paper present interesting mathematical models of several basic principles of the physics of mind, such as perception and cognition, concepts and emotions, instincts and learning. (...) Their conceptualization helps to clarify the distinction between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind that is often neglected and further provide a clear description of the mental hierarchy, which extends from physical objects in the physical world to abstract ideas in the mental/subjective realm. While we agree that identification of a few fundamental principles is a first step toward developing the physics of the mind, and we concur with the selection of those principles in the target review paper, we think that the theory of the physics of mind would much benefit from considering also the most basic principles that are common for the physics/matter/brain and the mind/subjectivity/cognition. In this respect, such basic principles as time and space, as well as criticality, self-organization, and emergence seem to be the most interesting. (shrink)

Despite the fact that attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations, our understanding of its neurophysiological mechanisms is far from complete. There are many theoretical models that try to fill this gap in knowledge, though practically all of them concentrate only on either involuntary (bottom-up) or voluntarily (top-down) aspect of attention. At the same time, both aspects of attention are rather integrated in the living brain. In this chapter we attempt to conceptualise both aspects of attentional (...) state within the theory of Operational Architectonics of brain and mind functioning, which provides a plausible theoretical basis for neurophysiological understanding of how attention is brought to existence in the living brain. (shrink)

Based on the theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concepts, we hypothesized that the spatio-temporal pattern of functional connectivity within the default-mode network (DMN) should persist unchanged across a variety of different cognitive tasks or acts, thus being task-unrelated. This supposition is in contrast with current understanding that DMN activated when the subjects are resting and deactivated during any attention-demanding cognitive tasks. To test our proposal, we used, in retrospect, the results from our two early studies ([Fingelkurts, 1998] and [Fingelkurts et al., (...) 2003]). In both studies for the majority of experimental trails we indeed found a constellation of operationally synchronized cortical areas (indexed as DMN) that was persistent across all studied experimental conditions in all subjects. Furthermore, we found three major elements comprising this DMN: two symmetrical occipito-parieto-temporal and one frontal spatio-temporal patterns. This new data directly supports the notion that DMN has a specific functional connotation – it provides neurophysiologic basis for self-processing operations, namely first-person perspective taking and an experience of agency. (shrink)

The brain displays both the anatomical features of a vast amount of interconnected topological mappings as well as the functional features of a nonlinear, metastable system at the edge of chaos, equipped with a phase space where mental random walks tend towards lower energetic basins. Nevertheless, with the exception of some advanced neuro-anatomic descriptions and present-day connectomic research, very few studies have been addressing the topological path of a brain embedded or embodied in its external and internal environment. Herein, by (...) using new formal tools derived from algebraic topology, we provide an account of the metastable brain, based on the neuro-scientific model of Operational Architectonics of brain-mind functioning. We introduce a “topodynamic” description that shows how the relationships among the countless intertwined spatio-temporal levels of brain functioning can be assessed in terms of projections and mappings that take place on abstract structures, equipped with different dimensions, curvatures and energetic constraints. Such a topodynamical approach, apart from providing a biologically plausible model of brain function that can be operationalized, is also able to tackle the issue of a long-standing dichotomy: it throws indeed a bridge between the subjective, immediate datum of the naïve complex of sensations and mentations and the objective, quantitative, data extracted from experimental neuro-scientific procedures. Importantly, it opens the door to a series of new predictions and future directions of advancement for neuroscientific research. (shrink)

In this brief overview paper, we analyse information flow in the brain. Although Shannon’s information concept, in its pure algebraic form, has made a number of valuable contributions to neuroscience, information dynamics within the brain is not fully captured by its classical description. These additional dynamics consist of self-organisation, interplay of stability/instability, timing of sequential processing, coordination of multiple sequential streams, circular causality between bottom-up and top-down operations, and information creation. Importantly, all of these processes are dynamic, hierarchically nested and (...) correspond to continuous brain state change, even if the external environment remains constant. This is where metastable coordination comes into play. In a metastable regime of brain functioning, as a result of the simultaneous co-existence of tendencies for independence and cooperation, information is continuously created, preserved for some time and then dissipated through the formation of dynamical and nested spatio-temporal coalitions among simple neuronal assemblies and larger coupled conglomerates of them—so-called delocalised operational modules. (shrink)

Various kinds of observations show that the ability of human beings to both consciously relive past events – episodic memory – and conceive future events, entails an active process of construction. This construction process also underpins many other important aspects of conscious human life, such as perceptions, language and conscious thinking. This article provides an explanation of what makes the constructive process possible and how it works. The process mainly relies on attentional activity, which has a discrete and periodic nature, (...) and working memory, which allows for the combination of discrete attentional operations. An explanation is also provided of how past and future events are constructed. (shrink)