Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, which (...) took place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

We construct an event-based computer simulation model of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm experiments with photons. The algorithm is a one-to-one copy of the data gathering and analysis procedures used in real laboratory experiments. We consider two types of experiments, those with a source emitting photons with opposite but otherwise unpredictable polarization and those with a source emitting photons with fixed polarization. In the simulation, the choice of the direction of polarization measurement for each detection event is arbitrary. We use three different procedures (...) to identify pairs of photons and compute the frequency of coincidences by analyzing experimental data and simulation data. The model strictly satisfies Einstein’s criteria of local causality, does not rely on any concept of quantum theory and reproduces the results of quantum theory for both types of experiments. We give a rigorous proof that the probabilistic description of the simulation model yields the quantum theoretical expressions for the single- and two-particle expectation values. (shrink)

Retrospective subjective well-being (SWB) refers to self-reported satisfaction and emotional experience over the past few weeks or months. Two studies investigated the mechanisms linking daily experiences to retrospective SWB. Participants reported events each day for 21 days (Study 1) or twice a week for two months (Study 2). The emotional intensity of each event was rated: (1) when it had recently occurred (proximal intensity); and (2) at the end of the event-reporting period (distal intensity). Both sets of ratings (...) were then aggregated across events and used to predict retrospective SWB at the end of the study. Path analyses showed that proximal intensity predicted retrospective SWB whereas distal intensity did not. The effect remained even after controlling for trait happiness and neuroticism. These results suggest that daily experiences influence retrospective SWB primarily through abstract representations of the past few weeks or months (as measured by aggregated proximal intensity ratings) rather than the explicit recollection of individual events during the same period (as measured by aggregated distal intensity ratings). Retrospective SWB, in turn, mediated the effect of daily experiences on global SWB (i.e., self-reported satisfaction and emotional experiences in general). (shrink)

The author argues that Quine’s criticism of Kantian analytical/synthetic distinction, as well as transcendentalist reductionism, is not entirely adequate. Furthermore, the author states that Kant’s and Quine’s theories of experience and cognition (transcendentalist and holistic) are based on a common dogma, the one of consistency. Taking into account their uncritical ac-ceptance of experience as a system that is able to adjust new and old elements to each other, both philosophers have much more in common than Quine and his followers might (...) have ex- pected. (shrink)

BackgroundHospitals face a disclosure dilemma when large-scale adverse events affect multiple patients and the chance of harm is extremely low. Understanding the perspectives of patients who have received disclosures following such events could help institutions develop communication plans that are commensurate with the perceived or real harm and scale of the event.MethodsA mailed survey was conducted in 2008 of 266 University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) patients who received written disclosure in 2004 about a large-scale, low-harm/low-risk adverse event (...) involving an incomplete endoscope cleaning process. The survey measured patients’ satisfaction with this disclosure, their concerns about healthcare outcomes, and their recommendations for future communication, given similar circumstances.ResultsSurveys were received from 127 of 266 (48 percent) of eligible respondents; 98 percent thought that UWMC was right to inform them about this event, and mean satisfaction with the disclosure was 7.7 on a 0 to 10 scale. Of the 127 respondents, 64 percent were somewhat or very concerned that the endoscope cleaning problem might cause them health problems; 60 percent reported their impressions of UWMC’s honesty and integrity had increased; 31 percent said their perceptions of the quality of care had increased; 94 percent agreed that institutions should tell patients about any error in their care, even when the risk of harm was low, although 28 percent agreed that such notifications would make them anxious. Respondents who reported concern that the event could cause them health problems were less likely to be satisfied with the institution’s disclosure. Patients cited their right to know information material to their own health and healthcare as an important reason for disclosure.ConclusionRecipients of disclosure of a large-scale, low-harm/low-risk event overwhelmingly supported being told of the event and endorsed notification of patients for similar events in the future. Although informing patients may cause concern for some, institutions should ensure their disclosure policies and procedures reflect their patients’ preferences. (shrink)

It is argued that experiences are complex events that befall their subjects. Each experience has a single subject and depends on the state or the event that it is of. The constituents of an experience are its subject, its grounding event or state, and everything that the subject is aware of during that time that's relevant to the telling of the story of how it was to participate in that event or be put in that state. The experience (...) occurs where the person having the experience is. An experience of an event or state occurs when that event or state makes a difference to its possessor's conscious life, where this difference is either a matter of really knowing what's happening or merely a matter of being affected. (shrink)

EEGs were analyzed to investigate the effect of experiences in listening to preferred music in dancers and non-dancers. Participants passively listened to instrumental music of their preferred genre for 2 min, alternate genres, and silence. Both groups showed increased activity for their preferred music compared to non-preferred music in the gamma, beta, and alpha frequency bands. The results suggest all participants' conscious recognition of and affective responses to their familiar music, appreciation of the tempo embedded in their preferred music (...) and emotional arousal, and enhanced attention mechanism for cognitive operations such as memory retrieval. The observed alpha activity is considered in the framework of the alpha functional inhibition hypothesis, in that years of experience listening to their favorite type of music may have honed the cerebral responses to achieve efficient cortical processes. Analyses of the electroencephalogram activity over 100s-long music pieces revealed a difference between dancers and non-dancers in the magnitude of an initial alpha event-related desynchronization and the later development of an alpha event-related synchronization for their preferred music. Dancers exhibited augmented alpha ERD, as well as augmented and uninterrupted alpha ERS over the remaining 80s. This augmentation in dancers is hypothesized to be derived from creative cognition or motor imagery operations developed through their dance experiences. (shrink)

Introduction. Activist philosophy and the occurrent arts -- The ether and your anger toward a speculative pragmatism -- The thinking-feeling of what happens putting the radical back in empiricism -- The diagram as technique of existence ovum of the universe segmented -- Arts of experience, politics of expression In four movements. First movement. To dance a storm -- Second movement. Life unlimited -- Third movement. The paradox of content -- Fourth movement. Composing the political.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 13, Issue 1, Page 187-205, January 2021.

This book introduces an events-based approach to understanding digital experience. Focusing on the event-ontologies of Bergson and Whitehead's process metaphysics, it explores subjective experience and objective reality as unified 'events' in the form of concrete slabs of existence. Such slabs are temporally defined by a term or period, in which all physical-chemical processes and personal subjective experience are included. Bringing together insights from a range of different specialisms, it urges us to consider a science of nature that includes (...) both physical and non-physical realities and, from this ontological position, draws on philosophy, media, and user experience practice to provide a new account of the technological or virtual world of today. An examination of the manner in which process philosophy may be applied to contemporary digital experience, this volume will appeal to scholars of philosophy, science and technology studies and information systems. (shrink)

Events—the experiences we think we are having and recall having had—are constructed; they are not what actually occurs. What occurs is ongoing dynamic, multidimensional, sensory flow, which is somehow transformed via psychological processes into structured, describable, memorable units of experience. But what is the nature of the redescription processes that fluently render dynamic sensory streams as event representations? How do such processes cope with the ubiquitous novelty and variability that characterize sensory experience? How are event‐rendering skills acquired and (...) how do event representations change with development? This review considers emerging answers to these questions, beginning with evidence that an implicit tendency to monitor predictability structure via statistical learning is key to event rendering. That is, one way that the experience of bounded events (e.g., actions within behavior, words within speech) arises is with the detection of “troughs” in sensory predictability. Interestingly, such troughs in predictability are often predictable; these regions of predictable‐unpredictability provide articulation points to demarcate one event from another in representations derived from the actual streaming information. In our information‐optimization account, a fluent event‐processor predicts such troughs and selectively attends to them—while suppressing attention to other regions—as sensory streams unfold. In this way, usage of attentional resources is optimized for efficient sampling of the most relevant, information‐rich portions of the unfolding flow of sensation. Such findings point to the development of event‐processing fluency—whether in action, language, or other domains—depending crucially on rapid and continual cognitive reorganization. As knowledge of predictability grows, attention is adaptively redeployed. Accordingly, event experiences undergo continuous alteration. (shrink)

Appraisal theories predict that emotional experiences are tightly linked to context appraisals. However, depressed people tend to perceive a variety of emotional events more negatively and stressfully and their emotional experience has been described as context insensitive. This raises the question: how different is the intensity of context appraisals from related emotion experiences among depressed relative to healthy people? Surprisingly, we do not know how cohesive intensity of context appraisals and emotional experiences are in depression. In (...) this study, we assessed differences in intensity of context appraisals and emotional experiences across 1634 daily events during three days within and between depressed participants (N = 41) and healthy controls (N = 33) using linear mixed models. Models compared intensities of stressfulness and unpleasantness appraisals to the intensity of negative affect, and intensity of pleasantness appraisals to the intensity of positive affect. Our findings partially supported our predictions of lower cohesiveness in depression: while intensities of pleasantness appraisals and positive affect were more alike among control participants, intensities of unpleasantness and stressfulness appraisals were more similar to the intensities of negative affect in the depressed group. Current work suggests that hedonic dysfunction in depression is possibly driven by a loosely tied positive context appraisal-emotion experience process. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (...) (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

Mass participation sport events have become a popular form of recreational sport participation. Understanding experiences of participants is pivotal to designing and implementing socially just and sustainable events. Applying constructivist grounded theory methodology, this inquiry explored experiences of participation in MPSEs, with particular attention to the impact of gender on participation experiences. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 women who participated in MPSEs. Fear and power were two core themes in interviewees’ experiences. Fear of (...) sexual assault, injury, and “something bad” was a significant element in women’s experiences which related to perceptions of place and time. The second theme, power, was generated from strong sport identities, camaraderie among female runners, all-women races, and finishing mixed-gender races. The findings provide some guidelines for practitioners to enhance experiences of female participants and encourage repeated participation that is key to sustainability of the events. (shrink)

Drawing on the Ideal Standards Model, the current study investigated whether the relationship events and experiences that occur on a given day in romantic relationships were associated with partner evaluations. Individuals in a current romantic relationship completed daily measures of positive and negative relationship events and experiences and partner evaluations for seven consecutive days. As hypothesized, findings demonstrated that on a given day negative relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as falling (...) short of mate ideals, while positive relationship events and experiences were associated with evaluating partners as more closely meeting ideals. The findings demonstrate the importance of the relational context in evaluations of a partner against ideal standards. (shrink)

Exact wavelet solutions of the wave equation for accelerating potentials are found and applied to single individual events in Stern-Gerlach experiment.

In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers (...) existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience. (shrink)

Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object‐directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants’ predictive gaze‐shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to‐be‐obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is still incomplete. By (...) about 6 months of age, infants show goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants’ ability for action‐goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non‐human agents (e.g., object‐directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self‐propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action‐event perspective. In particular, infants’ goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom‐up processing of perceptual information and top‐down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions. (shrink)

A re-visitation of Joule’s experiment motivates a critical analysis of thermodynamic notions: heat, total energy, first principle, organization of a scientific theory, its relationships with logic and mathematics. A rational re-construction of thermodynamics is suggested according to the model of a problem-based organization, that Sadi Carnot applied to his formulation. The new formulation accomplishes the long time theoretical process started by Joule’s experiment within physicists community's collective mind, i.e. the process of exiting out Baconian science for suggesting a first theory (...) out Newton’s paradigm, and eventually for introducing a pluralism of incompatible physical theories. (shrink)

A visual experience, as understood here, is a sensory event that is conscious, or like something to undergo. This chapter focuses on three issues concerning such experiences. The first issue is the so-called ‘transparency’ of experiences. The chapter distinguishes a number of different interpretations of the suggestion that visual experiences are ‘transparent’. It then discusses in what sense, if any, visual experiences are ‘transparent’, and what further conclusions one can draw from that. The second issue is (...) which properties we are presented with in visual experiences. It is widely accepted that we sometimes experience red for example. But exactly which properties do we sometimes visually experience, and which properties do we never visually experience? The third issue is which particulars, if any, we are presented with in visual experiences. Do we for example sometimes visually experience mind-independent particulars like trees? Do we sometimes visually experience mind-dependent, particular ‘sense-data’? (shrink)

Episodic memory is memory for past events. It’s characteristically associated with an experience of ‘mentally replaying’ one’s experiences in the mind’s eye. This biological phenomenon has inspired the development of several ‘experience replay’ algorithms in AI. In this chapter, I ask whether experience replay algorithms might shed light on a puzzle about episodic memory’s function: what does episodic memory contribute to the cognitive systems in which it is found? I argue that experience replay algorithms can serve as idealized (...) models of episodic memory for the purposes of addressing this question. Taking the DQN algorithm as a case study, I suggest that these algorithms provide some support for mnemonic accounts, on which episodic memory’s function lies in the storage, encoding and retrieval of information. By extending and adapting experience replay algorithms, we might gain further insight into episodic memory’s operations and contributions to cognition. (shrink)

Much of the excitement about virtual reality and its potential for things like entertainment, art, education, and activism is its ability to generate experiences that are powerfully immersive. However, discussions of VR tend to invoke the notion of immersive experience without subjecting it to closer scrutiny; and discussions often take it for granted that immersive experience is a single unified phenomenon. Against this, we argue that there are four distinct types or aspects of immersive experience that should be distinguished: (...) representational immersion, which corresponds roughly to what is sometimes called “psychological presence”; participatory immersion, which is related to the interactive aspects of VR experience; affective immersion, which has to do with the subject’s emotional relation to the experience; and narrative immersion, which captures the phenomenon of being caught up in the flow of events experienced. We argue that this four-way distinction helps us understand the powerfully immersive character of VR, while also recognizing its continuity with the immersion we experience with media such as novels, films, and music. We also argue that the account of immersion we offer here lets us better understand the connection between VR and empathy, charting a middle course between extreme enthusiasts who view VR as the ultimate “empathy machine” and extreme skeptics who argue that this attitude is misguided. (shrink)

This book is no less than the birth of a new discipline. The Experience Science is the indispensable tool for the global experience economy. Including a detailed analysis of the human experience process, the book provides the reader with a teachable methodology for staging unforgettable experiences that make a difference. It is a must for everyone in the experience industry who wants to leave his/her mark. Author Gerhard Frank - philosopher, natural scientist, and experience dramaturge - has been engaged (...) in the global attraction industry for 25 years. His clients come from different segments, including theme parks, museums, zoos, visitor centers, and other types of venues. (Series: Psychologie - Vol. 50). (shrink)

We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday (...) life, and how they then move across time and landscape. What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives. (shrink)

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics (...) [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)

What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on (...) the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles. (shrink)

A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are (...) mapped onto language are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure. (shrink)

There has been little previous scholarship regarding the aims, options and impact of ethics education on residential care‐givers. This manuscript details findings from a pragmatic cluster trial evaluating the impact of three different approaches to ethics education. The focus of the article is on one of the interventions, an immersive simulation experience. The simulation experience required residential care‐givers to assume the profile of elderly care‐recipients for a 24‐hr period. The care‐givers were student nurses. The project was reviewed favourably by a (...) university ethics committee, and participants provided informed consent. Data from six postsimulation experience focus groups were analysed thematically and three themes were identified: the experience of vulnerability, dignity in care and the organisation of care. Findings suggest that the immersive simulation experience had a powerful immediate impact as participants described epiphanous insights relating to their care experiences. It is suggested that reflecting on and recording epiphanous events has the potential to sustain ethical care practices. Further research is required to evaluate the impact of different ethics education interventions in different cultural contexts. Exploration is also required regarding the meaning and significance of care epiphanies, those “most delicate and evanescent of moments,” for the sustainability of ethical care. (shrink)

Some researchers claim that uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experiences because uncertainty toward an emotion-eliciting event prolongs attention to that event. However, some results contradict this claim. We assumed that curiosity rather than uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experience via attention, and that attention and emotional experience are prolonged only when uncertainty elicits curiosity. This assumption is based on the information gap theory, which proposes that curiosity increases with uncertainty, but that curiosity decreases at a certain level (...) of uncertainty. We conducted a survey study to investigate the relationships among curiosity, uncertainty, attention and duration of positive and negative emotional experiences. The results showed that curiosity, but not uncertainty, prolonged the duration of emotional experiences and the process was completely mediated by attention both for positive and negative emotions. Moreover, uncertainty prolonged the duration of emotional experiences only when uncertainty elicited curiosity, which in turn prolonged attention to the emotion-eliciting event. (shrink)

All lives contain negative events, but how we think about these events differs across individuals; negative events often include positive details that can be remembered alongside the negative, and the ability to maintain both representations may be beneficial. In a survey examining emotional responses to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the current study investigated how this ability shifts as a function of age and individual differences in initial experience of the event. Specifically, this study examined how emotional (...) importance, involvement, and self-reported surprise upon hearing about the event related to the tendency to report focusing on the negative and positive aspects of the bombings. Structural equation models revealed that while greater emotional importance and surprise were associated with a greater focus on negative elements, involvement and age were associated with increased consideration of positive aspects. Further, emotional importance was more strongly related to an increased focus on negative aspects for young adults and an increased focus on positive aspects for older adults, highlighting a tendency for older adults to enhance positive features of an otherwise highly negative event. (shrink)

An 'Event' can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision... An event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes--and the space of an event is the distance of an effect from its causes. But, asks Slavoj Žižek, does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things (...) that somehow happen out of nowhere? How can philosophy help us to determine what an event is and how it is possible?"--Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance and psycho-physiological measures . This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task . The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the (...) task and a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundA recent upsurge in nature-based exercise research demonstrates the potential added benefits of exercising in this context compared to more urban ones. Yet there is a lack of qualitative research investigating the lived experiences of those who participate in nature-based exercise events.ObjectiveTo explore the lived experience of individuals who were first-time participants in a nature-based running event.MethodSix participants who completed the Run Forrest trail run for the first time were individually interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were devised, and participants were (...) invited to talk about their experiences of running in the event. Interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.ResultsFollowing data analysis, two superordinate themes were constructed to resemble participant experiences. “Maintaining good health is vital” reflected participants’ personal theory of health and their perceived benefits of exercise. “Nature as a special place” reflected the atmospheric characteristics of the event, including the pre-event set-up and the actual running event itself.ConclusionAnalysis suggests that participants considered the event and natural environment to provide unique value adding opportunities that encouraged positive experiences. These results also reaffirm the positive benefits associated with nature-based exercise, including potential benefits to individual wellbeing. Further research in this context may strengthen our collective understanding regarding individual motivation towards such events. (shrink)

In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical complex, which supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state, as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. (...) This basic anatomy and physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior. (shrink)

What is consciousness? Some philosophers have contended that ‘qualia’, or an experiential medium from which consciousness is derived, exists as a fundamental component of reality. Whitehead, for example, described the universe as being comprised of ‘occasions of experience’. To examine this possibility scientifically, the very nature of physical reality must be re-examined. We must come to terms with the physics of space-time -- as is described by Einstein's general theory of relativity -- and its relation to the fundamental theory of (...) matter -- as described by quantum theory. This leads us to employ a new physics of objective reduction: OR which appeals to a form of ‘quantum gravity’ to provide a useful description of fundamental processes at the quantum/classical borderline . Within the OR scheme, we consider that consciousness occurs if an appropriately organized system is able to develop and maintain quantum coherent superposition until a specific ‘objective’ criterion is reached; the coherent system then self-reduces . We contend that this type of objective self-collapse introduces non-computability, an essential feature of consciousness. OR is taken as an instantaneous event -- the climax of a self-organizing process in fundamental space-time -- and a candidate for a conscious Whitehead-like ‘occasion’ of experience. How could an OR process occur in the brain, be coupled to neural activities, and account for other features of consciousness? We nominate an OR process with the requisite characteristics to be occurring in cytoskeletal microtubules within the brain's neurons. (shrink)