Default Mode Network

Self-referential processing has been principally investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, understanding of the brain functioning is not possible without careful comparison of the evidence coming from different methodological domains. This paper aims to review electroencephalographic (EEG) studies of self-referential processing and to evaluate how they correspond, complement, or contradict the existing fMRI evidence. There are potentially two approaches to the study of EEG correlates of self-referential processing. Firstly, because simultaneous registration of EEG and fMRI has become possible, the degree of overlap between these two signals in brain regions related to self-referential processing could be determined. Second and more direct approach would be the study of EEG correlates of self-referential processing per se. In this review, I discuss studies, which employed both these approaches and show that in line with fMRI evidence, EEG correlates of...

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A great American psychologist summarizes one of the most difficult of subjects--the nature of dreaming--after decades of lifting matters out of the morass of Freudianism. The result nonetheless is a thin gruel that misses the main thing about dreams: their unworldly imaginative power. But he is not the only one. Who defends the psyche in modern science? Who knows what it is, where it resides, and how it controls the brain? The true theory of dreaming will emerge only by facing and answering these questions, which can be said to have baffled ancient, medieval, and modern investigators alike. At present materialism stands confused, pathetically benighted in its own shadow.

Readers are now advised that a new approach to the true theory of dreaming, as well as the first mechanistic explanation of Night Terrors in scientific history, is contained in the reviewer's illustrated essay on this page called 'The Last Day.' Both this late 2017 review and the new 2020 essay concern the same foundational ideas within idealism and can be said to blend smoothly together to produce an increasingly coherent view of the phenomenology as well as the fundamental nature of dreaming, the achievement of which depends on isolating and identifying the cosmic generator of dreams.

See also 'Sartre on Dreaming' (2022) and 'On the Materialization of Being' (2022) for deeper insights into the nature of dreaming according to idealism and in the context of the embodiment of the psyche, which reaches far deeper inwardly than the farthest galaxies are from the Solar System.

Background: Centeredness Theory (CT) is proposed as a new mental health paradigm that focuses on well-being at a systems-level, across the core life domains of the self, the family unit, relationships, community, and work. The current studies aimed to validate the psychometric properties of a new scale that measures CT against existing well-being and mental health measures.

Methods: Study 1 included 488 anonymous online respondents (46% females, 28% males, 25% unknown with median age between 31 and 35 years) across 38 countries who completed the CT scale. Study 2 included 49 first-year psychology students (90% females, mean age of 19 years) from Sydney Australia that completed the CT scale and other well-being and mental health questionnaires at baseline and 2-weeks follow-up.

Results: Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a refined 60-item CT scale with five domains, each with four sub-domains. The CT scale demonstrated good internal consistency reliability and test-retest reliability, and showed evidence of convergent validity against other well-being measures (e.g., COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale, SWLS scale, and Ryff's Psychological Well-being scale).

Conclusions: The CT scale appears to be a reliable measure of well-being at a systems-level. Future studies need to confirm these findings in larger heterogeneous samples.

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The grinding and wearisome Spirit of War, a perversion of the oft-lamented but inescapable Struggle for Existence, is suddenly unmasked as the pathological reflection of the Soul of the World and its Infinite Life. Concrete and wide-ranging evidence in modern physics and neuroscience shows how it embroils the Life of Man, leading to ever-greater moral malignancy and a Final Crisis.

Compare on this page independent discussions of the immanent Final Crisis and evidence for it:

https://www.academia.edu/44692464/The_Antichrist

https://www.academia.edu/44275896/Thematic_Apperceptions_Surrounding_Max_Picards_Human_Face_1930_With_Ancillary_Illustrations

https://www.academia.edu/41144933/The_Last_Day_Illustrated_Essay_

The discussion within 'The Spirit of War' ranges widely and steps into the Paleolithic, the Holocene, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, 5th-century Classical Greece, and 17th- and 19th-century Germany, finally emerging into the global forum of modern brain science.

Classical German Idealism is shown in intimate relation to the highest (pythagoric) reaches of Greek philosophy in order to dissect the problem of Trifurcated Man through novel approaches within the philosophies of mind and nature, theology, paleontology, ontology of animal development, the fascinating neurology of Left and Right, and the once alluring goal of an integral psychology.

Lastly, the grimacing Visage of Man--a three-fold cliche of modern life--is exposed as an aesthetic failure contemporaneous with the very birth of Mankind and the onset of continuous psychophysical war within Man himself. (Note: Fair Use and Quotation freely granted to world scholarship.)

Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is frequently described as a focus on present sensory input without cognitive elaboration or emotional reactivity, and is associated with improved task performance and decreased stress-related symptomology. Unfortunately, such distinctions fail to acknowledge similarities and interactions between the two states. Instead of an inverse relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, a more nuanced characterization of mindfulness may involve skillful toggling back and forth between conceptual and nonconceptual processes and networks supporting each state, to meet the contextually specified demands of the situation. In this article, we present a theoretical analysis and plausible neurocognitive framework of the restful mind, in which we attempt to clarify potentially adaptive contributions of both mind wandering and mindful awareness through the lens of the extant neurocognitive literature on intrinsic network activity, meditation, and emerging descriptions of stillness and nonduality. A neurophenomenological approach to probing modality-specific forms of concentration and nonconceptual awareness is presented that may improve our understanding of the resting state. Implications for future research are discussed.

How is it that psychedelics so profoundly impact brain and mind? According to the highly influential model of "Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics" (REBUS) (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2019), wherein 5-HT2a agonism is thought to help relax prior expectations, so making room for new perspectives and patterns. This model is contextualized within the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework, as well as the associated neuronal processes theory of hierarchical predictive processing. More specifically, excessive excitation of deep pyramidal neurons is thought to cause paradoxical desynchronization, so "flattening" (Bayesian) "belief landscapes" by attenuating large-scale complexes of synchronous neural activity, particularly at alpha frequencies. Here, we introduce an alternative (but largely compatible) perspective, in that while such effects may be both real and important, these alterations may primarily correspond to a rare (but potentially pivotal) regime of very high levels of serotonin 2a receptor (5-HT2aR) agonism. We suggest an opposite effect may occur along much of the dose-response curve of 5-HT2aR stimulation, in which synchronous neural activity becomes more powerful, with accompanying "Strengthened Beliefs Under Psychedelics" (SEBUS) effects. We believe that REBUS effects are indeed crucially important aspects of psychedelic experiences, but suggest these exist alongside SEBUS effects in various combinations. As such, we propose a larger integrative perspective for understanding "Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (ALBUS). The ALBUS framework provides a rich account of cognition based on predictive processing, which we believe provides a means of fruitfully integrating across theories of psychedelic action ranging from REBUS, to “thalamic gating” (Preller et al., 2019), to the newly suggested “cortico-striatal thalamo-cortical” model (Doss et al., 2021). Towards this end we demonstrate the utility of ALBUS by providing neurophenomenological models of psychedelics focusing on mechanisms of conscious perceptual synthesis, as well as hippocampally-orchestrated episodic memory and mental simulation. We further discuss cognitive diversity (including psychopathology) through the lens of these models. We consider the potential significances of modifications of the default mode network and alpha rhythms for creativity and various states of consciousness, including with respect to fundamental alterations in sense of self through ego dissolution. Finally, we survey a broad range of psychedelic phenomena and consider potential explanations, implications, and directions for future work.

En esta segunda parte se sugiere una base neurobiológica para el pensamiento mágico. Primero se establece su diferencia e independencia respecto a la religión, en tanto ya discutido anteriormente que ésta per se no es biológicamente adaptativa (p.ej. no tiene base genética), pero sí algunos de sus componentes estructurales como la Teoría de la Mente o el pensamiento mágico. Luego, se muestra un continuum de la dopamina entre la agencia, la ilusión de control, la respuesta al estrés, la prosocialidad, y los sistemas vitales. La cascada de activaciones neural/química/cognitiva es la siguiente:
---
de arriba hacia abajo (córtex → respuesta de estrés)
---
percepción del estímulo estresante
↓
disparo del núcleo de agencia (córtex temporal/parietal: reconocimiento biológico, facial, de mirada, de intención, física intuitiva, todo lo que es ya pensamiento mágico)
+ emoción (amígdala, sistema límbico)
↓
activación de la respuesta de estrés (eje límbico-hipotalámico-pituitario-adrenal)
---
de abajo hacia arriba (respuesta de estrés → córtex)
---
activación de expectativa de recompensa (dopamina) y socialización (oxitocina, vasopresina)
↓
hiperagencia (córtex temporal/parietal, prefrontal medial, amígdala, hipocampo) = pensamiento mágico
+ profunda experiencia emocional-social
↓
creencia mágica / posible inhibición
---

En estos circuitos neurohormonales de recompensa y socialización, la dopamina es el mensajero decisivo para, en el eje frontal-temporal, agudizar la agencia o pensamiento mágico como la dimensión cognitiva de una estrategia biológica de afrontamiento del estrés. El control genético es lógicamente necesario aquí. Se concluye que, en vista de esta base neurobiológica, el pensamiento mágico estaría profundamente pre-programado en el cerebro humano.

Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder with variable symptomatology, traditionally divided into positive and negative symptoms, and cognitive deficits. However, the etiology of this disorder has yet to be fully understood. Recent findings suggest that alteration of the basic sense of self-awareness may be an essential distortion of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In addition, extensive research of social and mentalizing abilities has stressed the role of distortion of social skills in schizophrenia.This article aims to propose and support a concept of a triple brain network model of the dysfunctional switching between default mode and central executive network (CEN) related to the aberrant activity of the salience network. This model could represent a unitary mechanism of a wide array of symptom domains present in schizophrenia including the deficit of self (self-awareness and self-representation) and theory of mind (ToM) dysfunctions along with the traditional posit...

Creativity is a vast construct, seemingly intractable to scientific inquiry-perhaps due to the vague concepts applied to the field of research. One attempt to limit the purview of creative cognition formulates the construct in terms of evolutionary constraints, namely that of blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). Behaviorally, one can limit the "blind variation" component to idea generation tests as manifested by measures of divergent thinking. The "selective retention" component can be represented by measures of convergent thinking, as represented by measures of remote associates. We summarize results from measures of creative cognition, correlated with structural neuroimaging measures including structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS). We also review lesion studies, considered to be the "gold standard" of brain-behavioral studies. What emerges is a pictu...

Abstract
Insular cortex is one of the brain regions that show consistent abnormalities in both structural and functional neuroimaging studies in schizophrenia. In healthy individuals insula has been implicated in a myriad of physiological functions. Anterior cingulate cortex and insula together constitute the Salience Network (SN), an intrinsic large-scale network showing strong functional connectivity. Considering insula as a functional unit along with anterior cingulate cortex provides an integrated understanding of the role of insula in information processing. In this review, we bring together evidence from imaging studies to understand the role of salience network in schizophrenia, and propose a model of insular dysfunction in psychosis.

The right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) has been associated with two apparently disparate functional roles: in attention and in social cognition. According to one account, the rTPJ initiates a "circuit-breaking" signal that interrupts ongoing attentional processes, effectively reorienting attention. It is argued this primary function of the rTPJ has been extended beyond attention, through a process of evolutionarily cooption, to play a role in social cognition. We propose an alternative account, according to which the capacity for social cognition depends on a network which is both distinct from and in tension with brain areas involved in focused attention and target detection: the default mode network (DMN). Theory characterizing the rTPJ based on the area's purported role in reorienting may be falsely guided by the co-occurrence of two distinct effects in contiguous regions: activation of the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), associated with its functional role in target...

Initially described as task-induced deactivations during goal-directed paradigms of high attentional load, the unresolved
functionality of default mode regions has long been assumed to interfere with task performance. However,
recent evidence suggests a potential defaultmode network involvement in fulfilling cognitive demands.We
tested this hypothesis in a finger opposition paradigmwith task and fixation periodswhichwe compared with an
independent resting state scan using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a comprehensive analysis pipeline
including activation, functional connectivity, behavioural and graph theoretical assessments. The results indicate
task specific changes in the default mode network topography. Behaviourally, we show that increased
connectivity of the posterior cingulate cortex with the left superior frontal gyrus predicts faster reaction times.
Moreover, interactive and dynamic reconfiguration of the default mode network regions' functional connections
illustrates their involvement with the task at hand with higher-level global parallel processing power, yet preserved
small-world architecture in comparison with rest. These findings demonstrate that the default mode network
does not disengage during this paradigm, but instead may be involved in task relevant processing.

Creativity is a vast construct, seemingly intractable to scientific inquiry-perhaps due to the vague concepts applied to the field of research. One attempt to limit the purview of creative cognition formulates the construct in terms of evolutionary constraints, namely that of blind variation and selective retention (BVSR). Behaviorally, one can limit the "blind variation" component to idea generation tests as manifested by measures of divergent thinking. The "selective retention" component can be represented by measures of convergent thinking, as represented by measures of remote associates. We summarize results from measures of creative cognition, correlated with structural neuroimaging measures including structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS). We also review lesion studies, considered to be the "gold standard" of brain-behavioral studies. What emerges is a pictu...