The stream of consciousness often appears whimsical and free from external control. Recent advances, however, reveal that the stream is more susceptible to external influence than previously assumed. Thoughts can be triggered by external stimuli in a manner that is involuntary, systematic, and nontrivial. Based on these advances, our experimental manipulation systematically triggered a sequence of, not one, but two involuntary thoughts. Participants were instructed to (a) not subvocalize the name of visual objects and (b) not count the number of letters comprising object names. On a substantial proportion of trials, participants experienced both kinds of involuntary thoughts. Each thought arose from distinct, high-level processes (naming versus counting). This is the first demonstration of the induction of two involuntary thoughts into the stream of consciousness. Stimulus word length influenced dependent measures systematically. Our findings are relevant to many fields associated with the study of consciousness, including attention, imagery, and action control.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.12.014 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Opening the black box: Think Aloud as a method to study the spontaneous stream of consciousness.
Conscious Cogn
January 2025
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Asking participants to Think Aloud is a common method for studying conscious experience, but it remains unclear whether this approach alters thought qualities-such as meta-awareness, rate of topic shifts, or the content of thoughts in task-absent conditions. To investigate this, we conducted two studies comparing thinking aloud to thinking silently. In Study 1, 111 participants alternated between 15-minute intervals of verbalizing and silently reflecting on their stream of consciousness in a counterbalanced design.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain under surgical anesthesia: focus on nociception and attention network.
Neuroscience
December 2024
Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, Faculty of Medicine, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Electronic address:
Surgery endangers the integrity of the body through a continuous stream of noxious stimuli. General anesthesia helps patients cope with the surgery situation. In the first part of our literature review, we present our new knowledge about nociception as described by Sherrington.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCortical high-frequency oscillations (≈ 110 Hz) in cats are state-dependent and enhanced by a subanesthetic dose of ketamine.
Behav Brain Res
January 2025
Laboratorio de Neurobiología del Sueño, Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.
Ketamine is an NMDA receptor antagonist that has antidepressant and anesthetic properties. At subanesthetic doses, ketamine induces transient psychosis in humans, and is used to model psychosis in experimental animals. In rodents, subanesthetic doses of ketamine increase the power of high-frequency oscillations (HFO, > 100 Hz) in the electroencephalogram (EEG), a frequency band linked to cognitive functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPanpsychism and dualism in the science of consciousness.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev
October 2024
Brain and Consciousness Independent Research Center, Andijan 710132, Uzbekistan. Electronic address:
A resurgence of panpsychism and dualism is a matter of ongoing debate in modern neuroscience. Although metaphysically hostile, panpsychism and dualism both persist in the science of consciousness because the former is proposed as a straightforward answer to the problem of integrating consciousness into the fabric of physical reality, whereas the latter proposes a simple solution to the problem of free will by endowing consciousness with causal power as a prerequisite for moral responsibility. I take the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a paradigmatic exemplar of a theory of consciousness (ToC) that makes its commitments to panpsychism and dualism within a unified framework.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPresented here is a novel graphical, structural, and functional model of the embodied mind. Despite strictly adhering to a physicalistic and reductionist approach, this model successfully resolves the apparent contradiction between the thesis regarding the causal closure of the physical realm and the widely held common-sense belief that the mental realm can influence physical behavior. Furthermore, it substantiates the theory of mind-brain identity while shedding light on its neural foundation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!