Disembodiment and Affective Resonances in Esketamine Treatment of Depersonalized Depression Subtype: Two Case Studies.

Introduction: Dissociative experiences are considered undesirable ketamine's adverse events. However, they might be crucial for ketamine's antidepressant effects, at least in some depression subtypes. Current understandings of ketamine's therapeutic potentials converge on the so-called "relaxed prior hypothesis," suggesting that glutamatergic blockage up-weights bottom-up surprising somatosensory/affective states.

Medial anterior prefrontal cortex stimulation downregulates implicit reactions to threats and prevents the return of fear.

Downregulating emotional overreactions toward threats is fundamental for developing treatments for anxiety and post-traumatic disorders. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for top-down modulatory processes, and despite previous studies adopting repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over this region provided encouraging results in enhancing extinction, no studies have hitherto explored the effects of stimulating the medial anterior PFC (aPFC, encompassing the Brodmann area 10) on threat memory and generalization. Here we showed that rTMS over the aPFC applied before threat memory retrieval immediately decreases implicit reactions to learned and novel stimuli in humans.

Virtual Social Interaction in a Multiplayer-Online Video Game Increases Implicit Learning: An EEG Study.

It is well known that social interaction enhances learning processes, improving abilities such as attention and memorization. However, it is not clear whether similar advantages may be obtained even in virtual environments. Here, we investigate whether virtual interactions in a video game, similarly to real-life social interactions, may improve individuals' performance in a subsequent implicit learning task.

Shared attention in virtual immersive reality enhances electrophysiological correlates of implicit sensory learning.

Shared attention effects on learning and memory demonstrate that experiences are amplified when we are not alone. Virtual reality poses new challenges to the study of co-presence. Above all, is coattending together with someone else's avatar in an immersive VR setting comparable with shared experiences at a neural processing level? In the present study we investigate shared attention effects in VR for the first time.

The aesthetic valve: how aesthetic appreciation may switch emotional states from anxiety to curiosity.

Pursuing new knowledge in the entropic environment is pivotal for survival. However, dealing with uncertainty is a costly challenge for the agent surrounded by the stochastic sensory world, giving rise to different epistemic emotions, such as curiosity and anxiety. We recently proposed that aesthetic appreciation may have the role of associating pleasant feedback with the update of predictive representations.

Modulation of Motor Awareness: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study in the Healthy Brain.

Previous studies on the mechanisms underlying willed actions reported that the premotor cortex may be involved in the construction of motor awareness. However, its exact role is still under investigation. Here, we investigated the role of the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) in motor awareness by modulating its activity applying inhibitory rTMS to PMd, before a specific motor awareness task (under three conditions: without stimulation, after rTMS and after Sham stimulation).

Beyond alpha-band: The neural correlate of creative thinking.

The compound nature of creativity entails the interplay of multiple cognitive processes, making it difficult to attribute creativity to a single neural signature. Divergent thinking paradigms, widely adopted to investigate creative production, have highlighted the key role of specific mental operations subserving creativity, such as inhibition of external stimuli, loose semantic associations, and mental imagery. Neurophysiological studies have typically shown a high alpha rhythm synchronization when individuals are engaged in creative ideation.

Physical but not virtual presence of others potentiates implicit and explicit learning.

E-learning activities are becoming more and more common. Whilst it is well known that the physical presence of others motivates individuals to engage in perceptual and learning tasks, systematic investigations comparing the effects of physical and virtual co-presence of others on knowledge acquisition are still scarce. Here we investigate the effects of physical and virtual co-presence of others on explicit and implicit learning.

Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy.

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting).

Preferred music listening is associated with perceptual learning enhancement at the expense of self-focused attention.

Can preferred music listening improve following attentional and learning performances? Here we suggest that this may be the case. In Experiment 1, following preferred and non-preferred musical-piece listening, we recorded electrophysiological responses to an auditory roving-paradigm. We computed the mismatch negativity (MMN - the difference between responses to novel and repeated stimulation), as an index of perceptual learning, and we measured the correlation between trial-by-trial EEG responses and the fluctuations in Bayesian Surprise, as a quantification of the neural attunement with stimulus informational value.

The rubber hand illusion in microgravity and water immersion.

Our body has evolved in terrestrial gravity and altered gravitational conditions may affect the sense of body ownership (SBO). By means of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), we investigated the SBO during water immersion and parabolic flights, where unconventional gravity is experienced. Our results show that unconventional gravity conditions remodulate the relative weights of visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular inputs favoring vision, thus inducing an increased RHI susceptibility.

A Virtual Navigation Training Promotes the Remapping of Space in Allocentric Coordinates: Evidence From Behavioral and Neuroimaging Data.

Allocentric space representations demonstrated to be crucial to improve visuo-spatial skills, pivotal in every-day life activities and for the development and maintenance of other cognitive abilities, such as memory and reasoning. Here, we present a series of three different experiments: Experiment 1, Discovery sample (23 young male participants); Experiment 2, Neuroimaging and replicating sample (23 young male participants); and Experiment 3 (14 young male participants). In the experiments, we investigated whether virtual navigation stimulates the ability to form spatial allocentric representations.

Nice and easy: Mismatch negativity responses reveal a significant correlation between aesthetic appreciation and perceptual learning.

Neurocomputational models of cognition have framed aesthetic appreciation within the domain of knowledge acquisition and learning, suggesting that aesthetic appreciation might be considered as a hedonic feedback on successful perceptual learning dynamics. Such hypothesis, however, has never been empirically demonstrated yet. In order to investigate the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and learning, we measured the EEG mismatch negativity (MMN) response to more or less appreciated musical intervals, which is considered as a reliable index of perceptual learning.

Memorisation and implicit perceptual learning are enhanced for preferred musical intervals and chords.

Is it true that we learn better what we like? Current neuroaesthetic and neurocomputational models of aesthetic appreciation postulate the existence of a correlation between aesthetic appreciation and learning. However, even though aesthetic appreciation has been associated with attentional enhancements, systematic evidence demonstrating its influence on learning processes is still lacking. Here, in two experiments, we investigated the relationship between aesthetic preferences for consonance versus dissonance and the memorisation of musical intervals and chords.

Right and left inferior frontal opercula are involved in discriminating angry and sad facial expressions.

Background: Neuroimaging studies suggest that the inferior frontal operculum (IFO) is part of a neuronal network involved in facial expression processing, but the causal role of this region in emotional face discrimination remains elusive.

Objective: We used cathodal (inhibitory) tDCS to test whether right (r-IFO) and left (l-IFO) IFO play a role in discriminating basic facial emotions in healthy volunteers. Specifically, we tested if the two sites are selectively involved in the processing of facial expressions conveying high or low arousal emotions.

I'm a believer: Illusory self-generated touch elicits sensory attenuation and somatosensory evoked potentials similar to the real self-touch.

Sensory attenuation (i.e., the phenomenon whereby self-produced sensations are perceived as less intense compared to externally occurring ones) is among the neurocognitive processes that help distinguishing ourselves from others.

"Stopping for knowledge": The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle.

According to a millennial-old philosophical debate, aesthetic emotions have been connected to knowledge acquisition. Recent scientific evidence, collected across different disciplinary domains, confirms this link, but also reveals that motor inhibition plays a crucial role in the process. In this review, we discuss multidisciplinary results and propose an original account of aesthetic appreciation (the stopping for knowledge hypothesis) framed within the predictive coding theory.

Aesthetic appreciation of musical intervals enhances behavioural and neurophysiological indexes of attentional engagement and motor inhibition.

From Kant to current perspectives in neuroaesthetics, the experience of beauty has been described as disinterested, i.e. focusing on the stimulus perceptual features while neglecting self-referred concerns.

Beauty in mind: Aesthetic appreciation correlates with perceptual facilitation and attentional amplification.

Neuroaesthetic research suggests that aesthetic appreciation results from the interaction between the object perceptual features and the perceiver's sensory processing dynamics. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and attentional modulation at a behavioural and psychophysiological level. In a first experiment, fifty-eight healthy participants performed a visual search task with abstract stimuli containing more or less natural spatial frequencies and subsequently were asked to give an aesthetic evaluation of the images.

Everything is illuminated: Prismatic adaptation lowers visual detection threshold in normal subjects.

Prismatic adaptation (PA) results from repeated ballistic movements of the dominant arm toward visual targets while wearing prisms shifting the visual field laterally (visuomotor prismatic training [VPT]). Following PA, subjects' pointing movements are deviated contralaterally to prismatic shift (aftereffect). The question of whether spatial attention is also biased in the same direction remains controversial in the scientific literature.