Exploring the effect of microdosing psychedelics on creativity in an open-label natural setting.

Introduction: Taking microdoses (a mere fraction of normal doses) of psychedelic substances, such as truffles, recently gained popularity, as it allegedly has multiple beneficial effects including creativity and problem-solving performance, potentially through targeting serotonergic 5-HT receptors and promoting cognitive flexibility, crucial to creative thinking. Nevertheless, enhancing effects of microdosing remain anecdotal, and in the absence of quantitative research on microdosing psychedelics, it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions on that matter. Here, our main aim was to quantitatively explore the cognitive-enhancing potential of microdosing psychedelics in healthy adults.

Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation.

Studies investigating how people represent themselves and their own body often use variants of "ownership illusions", such as the traditional rubber-hand illusion or the more recently discovered enfacement illusion. However, these examples require rather artificial experimental setups, in which the artificial effector needs to be stroked in synchrony with the participants' real hand or face-a situation in which participants have no control over the stroking or the movements of their real or artificial effector. Here, we describe a technique to establish ownership illusions in a setup that is more realistic, more intuitive, and of presumably higher ecological validity.

Contributions of expected sensory and affective action effects to action selection and performance: Evidence from forced- and free-choice tasks.

Whereas ideomotor approaches to action control emphasize the importance of sensory action effects for action selection, motivational approaches emphasize the role of affective action effects. We used a game-like experimental setup to directly compare the roles of sensory and affective action effects in selecting and performing reaching actions in forced- and free-choice tasks. The two kinds of action effects did not interact.

Mood migration: How enfacing a smile makes you happier.

People tend to perceive the face of another person more as their own if own and other face are stroked in synchrony-the enfacement illusion. We conceptually replicated the enfacement illusion in a virtual reality environment, in which participants could control the movements of a virtual face by moving and touching their own face. We then used this virtual enfacement illusion to study whether enfacing a virtual face would also involve adopting the emotion that this face is expressing.

Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity - A review.

Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a topic for scientific research and theories on meditation are becoming ever more specific. We distinguish between what is called focused Attention meditation, open Monitoring meditation, and loving kindness (or compassion) meditation. Research suggests that these meditations have differential, dissociable effects on a wide range of cognitive (control) processes, such as attentional selection, conflict monitoring, divergent, and convergent thinking.