Sangeetha Menon

Interdisciplinary perspectives on consciousness and the self

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Consciousness, Agency and the Self.- Chapter 2: Conscious Agency and the Preconscious/Unconscious Self.- Chapter 3: Finding the Self and Losing the Ego in the State of Pure Consciousness.- Chapter 4: Converging on the Self: Western Philosophy, Eastern Meditation, Scientific Research.- Chapter 5: The Self as Organiser.- Chapter 6: Reconceptualizing the Separative Self. Chapter 7: Consciousness, Memory and Dreams in Kashyapa Samhita. Chapter 8: Experientially Acquired Knowledge of the Self in a Nonhuman Primate.- Chapter 9: Executive Functions as a Path to Understanding Nonhuman Con-sciousness: Looking under the Light.- Chapter 10: Self, Identity and Culture.- Part II: Self and First-person Phenomenology.- Chapter 11: Consciousness and First Person Phenomenology: First steps towards an Experiential Phenomenological Writing and Reading (EWR).- Chapter 12: Self and Neurophenomenology: Gift and Responsibility.- Chapter 13: The Inside-Outside Story of Consciousness: A Phenomenological Exploration.- Chapter 14: Self and Empathy.- Chapter 15: Adapted Self in the Context of Disability: An Ecological, Embodied Perspective.- Chapter 16: Self and Transformative Experiences: Three Indian Philosophers on Consciousness.- Part III: Boundaries of the Self and Origins of Consciousness.- Chapter 17: Soul, Neurons, Particles, or Mind-at-Large? Exploring the Boundaries of the Self.- Chapter 18: Is the Source of Awareness Present in the Quantum Vacuum?.- Chapter 19: Cosmological Considerations Relevant to the Origin of Consciousness.- Chapter 20: Reality and Consciousness: Is Quantum Biology the Future of Life Sciences?.- Chapter 21: Human Brain is a Coherent State of the Mind.- Chapter 22: Consciousness, Functional Geometry and Internal Representation.- Chapter 23: Consciousness, Libertarian Free Will and Quantum Randomness.

A heuristic model linking yoga philosophy and self-reflection to examine underlying mechanisms of add-on yoga treatment in schizophrenia

Abstract Preliminary evidence suggests efficacy of yoga as add-on treatment for schizophrenia, but the underlying mechanism by which yoga improves the symptoms of schizophrenia is not completely understood. Yoga improves self-reflection in healthy individuals, and self-reflection abnormalities are typically seen in schizophrenia. However, whether yoga treatment improves impairments in self-reflection typically seen in patients with schizophrenia is not examined. This paper discusses the potential mechanism of yoga in the treatment of schizophrenia and proposes a testable hypothesis for further empirical studies. It is proposed that self-reflection abnormalities in schizophrenia improve with yoga and the neurobiological changes associated with this can be examined using empirical behavioural measures and neuroimaging measures such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Functional connectivity patterns underlying the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is characterized by functional connectivity aberrations between brain regions that mediate different cognitive processes. The characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia such as delusions, hallucinations, passivity experiences etc. are suggested to reflect a disordered self-awareness. In the present study, we used a novel fMRI paradigm, the ‘Hallucination Attentional Modulation Task (HAMT)”, to examine the functional connectivity patterns underlying the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations in contrast to the patterns associated with processing of visual stimuli. We found that there was substantial overlap amongst healthy (n=8) and schizophrenia (n=6) subjects with respect to the functional connectivity patterns during the ‘free attention’ and ‘visual attention’ conditions of the paradigm. In patients with schizophrenia having continuous auditory verbal hallucinations, the connectivity between the bilateral superior parietal lobules and bilateral thalami were stronger during the ‘hallucination attention’ condition. These results provide preliminary leads that link auditory verbal hallucinations to an underlying disorder of self-agency.

The selfish meme & the selflessATMA

The word ‘meme’ was first used by Richard Dawkins (Dawkins, 1976)1 in the sense of a replicator to introduce the idea of cultural transmission through the process of imitation, just as genes are responsible for the evolution of organisms. Following Dawkins several writers came forth to have a closer look at ‘meme’. The consensus was that this was a fascinating way of explaining cultural evolution and transmission; that meme is the basic unit of (cultural) information whose existence influences events so as to make more copies of itself (Brodie, 1996).2 The book which got most attention in this line of literature wasThe Meme Machine (Blackmore, 1993),3 which favours the idea that culture, like biology, evolves through the process of variation, selection and replication. Something striking in Blackmore’s thesis is that emotions and attitudes do not count as memes since they are subjective and never get passed on.

Bridging Self, Culture and Consciousness

We live in a time when the emotions we possess, the identity we carry, the memories we retain, the decisions we take, the unconscious influences to which we are beholden, and the free will we exercise all impact upon the fundamental nature of our consciousness, and determine how the self and identity will express themselves or evolve in a multicultural and pluralistic world. Such evolutionary changes are to be seen in the context of variations in cultural practices, decision-making, social constructions and our self-identity. We are at a critical point in history, when never before have the intersections between culture, self and consciousness been so vital that the human species itself is redefining its distinctiveness as an evolving primate as well as a thinking and transforming person for the better. This chapter presents a synopsis of the larger goal of this volume, and raises questions in order to reflect upon the most exciting possibilities and debate the fundamental aspects of consciousness and self in the context of cultural, philosophical and multidisciplinary divergences. In this chapter we suggest that the understanding of self, culture and consciousness requires us to discover convergences between knowing and being, and the ensuing interdisciplinary insights will emerge from the cusp of philosophy, neurosciences, psychiatry and the medical humanities.

Body and Self-reflection: The Crux of Yoga Philosophy and Practice

Body and self-reflection are the central concepts of yoga philosophy based on which its psychology and phenomenology of the practice of yoga is built. The goal of yoga is to situate oneself within the twin reality of matter and consciousness, body and the self. This chapter suggests that there are four aspects of self-reflection that can be deduced from yoga psychology and its phenomenology: self-certainty, body-centrality, cognitive centrality and contentful experience.

Autobiographical Memory: Where Self, Wellbeing and Culture Congregate

Autobiographical remembrance, ‘memories of past personal experience’, is vital for social, emotional and directive dimensions of the cognition and behaviour of an individual. This form of memory, unique to humans, is a key constituent of the concept of self, strategies for coping up with stress and thus vital to understand the wellbeing. Studies are available to suggest that the structural and functional properties of the autobiographical memory of a person are sensitive to the culture to which the individual is adapted. This chapter reviews the interrelations between the self, autobiographical memory and culture, and its implications for the wellbeing of individuals.

Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Schizophrenia: A Model for Aberrant Self-consciousness

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a typical feature of schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder characterised by impaired ties with reality. Two major theories that attempt to explain the neurobiology of hallucinations involve the bottom-up theory (relating to impairment in auditory processing) and the top-down theory (relating to an impairment in internal monitoring). Self-agency, a sense of ownership of one’s actions, is hypothesised to be impaired in schizophrenia in accordance with the “top-down” perspective. Using advanced neuroimaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), one can probe the underlying mechanism of self-agency and its possible failure in patients experiencing AVH. This will not only shed light on the neurobiology of schizophrenia and AVH, but also generate insight into the neural correlates of self. In this chapter, we discuss self-agency and its possible failure in patients with schizophrenia experiencing AVH. We review various fMRI studies that have been employed to study AVH and discuss methodological considerations which one needs to keep in mind when devising such experiments. Finally, we introduce a novel fMRI paradigm—hallucination attention modulation task (HAMT) to study the neural correlates of AVH and discuss some preliminary results from our pilot study which link AVH to an underlying disorder of self-agency.

What Does It Mean for Qualia to be Intrinsic

An intrinsic property of an object is intuitively understood as the property which the object can have independent of all other objects. The notion of an intrinsic property figures prominently in the debates over consciousness. One of the arguments for the rejection of traditional physicalism—the thesis that all reality, including qualia, are physical—has been the claim that physical properties are merely extrinsic or relational, while qualia are intrinsic. What does it mean for a property to be intrinsic, and why do not physical properties qualify as intrinsic? This chapter is an attempt to make sense of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. It looks at two attempts at precisely defining an intrinsic property, and at an argument for epistemic humility—the thesis that we have no knowledge of intrinsic properties at all. It shall be argued that one exception can be made to the humility thesis—qualia. The qualia-as-intrinsic thesis is likely to have significant implications for various debates in philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, of which two shall be explored here. It shall be argued that given this thesis: (i). Combination of experiences is not possible. If one further assumes ontological monism, this thesis leads us to the conclusion that all entities are simples—such that they cannot be divided (ii). Relational properties are not reducible to intrinsic properties.

The 'Outer Self" and the 'Inner Body': Exteriorization of the self in cognitive sciences

In current trends in cognitive sciences, the discussion on body crosses the classical divide between the body and the self in terms of nature and function. Embodiment theories have helped to bring in the importance of the role of subjective experiences to understand cognition, and place the process of knowing in a cultural and social context. This article is a critique of the growing trend in cognitive sciences, particularly in affective neurosciences, and approaches, to reduce the experiential self to a nonentity. It is shown that though the apparent goal is to highlight the inner qualitative nature of experience, what is happening in the background is a role reversal. The outer body becomes the inner self. The inner self becomes the outer body. The nature and functions of the self are founded on the body by theorizing embodiment as an alternate to neural reductionism. This article argues that one of the negative consequences of embodiment theories is that age-old concepts of freewill, character and moral choices become flimsy and fleeting in the process of embodying cognition.