Previous studies have shown that misperceptions and illusory experiences can occur if sensory stimulation is withdrawn or becomes invariant even for short periods of time. Using a perceptual deprivation paradigm, we created a monotonous audiovisual environment and asked participants to verbally report any auditory, visual or body-related phenomena they experienced. The data (analysed using a variant of interpretative phenomenological analysis) revealed two main themes: (1) reported sensory phenomena have different spatial characteristics ranging from simple percepts to the feeling (...) of immersion in a complex multisensory environment and (2) the active contribution of the perceiver where participants report engaging in exploratory processes even when there is nothing to find. Detailed analysis of the qualitative data further showed that participants who reported more perceptual phenomena were more likely to report internal bodily sensations, move more during the experiment and score higher on the Revised Hallucination Scale than those reporting fewer percepts explicitly linking perceptual deprivation to somatic phenomena. The results demonstrate how the variety of sensory experiences induced by perceptual deprivation can give further insight into the factors mediating conscious awareness and may suggest ways in which the brain imposes meaning on the environment under invariant sensory conditions. (shrink)

Previously published studies have reported that 150 min of short-term monocular deprivation temporarily changes perceptual eye dominance. However, the possible mechanisms underlying monocular deprivation-induced perceptual eye dominance plasticity remain unclear. Using a binocular phase and contrast co-measurement task and a multi-pathway contrast-gain control model, we studied the effect of 150 min of monocular pattern deprivation in normal adult subjects. The perceived phase and contrast varied significantly with the interocular contrast ratio, and after MPD, the patched (...) eye became dominant. Most importantly, we focused on the potential mechanisms of the deprivation effect. The data of an averaged subject was best fitted by a model, which assumed a monocular signal enhancement of the PE after the MPD. The present findings might have important implications for investigations of binocular vision in both normal and amblyopic populations. (shrink)

The orphans of Romania were participants in what is sometimes called “the forbidden experiment”: depriving human infants of intimacy, affection, and human contact is an inhuman practice. It is an experiment which no ethical researcher would set out to do. This paper examines historical data, case histories, and research findings which deal with early deprivation and performs a phenomenological analysis of deprivation phenomena as they impact emotional and physical development. A key element of deprivation is the absence (...) of intimate relationships with other human beings. However, the absence of intimacy impacts not only the social/emotional abilities of infants, but their very ability to perceive the world. Philosophically and from a radically Merleau-Pontean perspective, the intimate face of the other appears to be a world opening event for the child. Its absence has a profound impact on the child’s experience of embodiment, coexistence, spatiality, temporality, and language. When seen through early deprivation, intimacy appears as a necessary foundation for establishing the transcendence of the world beyond perceptual presence, and it provides the possibility for language, culture, and history. (shrink)

The literature on sensory processing disorders in institutionalized infants highlights the impact of early deprivation on infant perception. Through a Merleau-Pontian, hyperdialectic analysis of the extraordinary development of infant perception under circumstances of severe deprivation the intimate link between environmental affordances and perceptual systems becomes apparent. This paper offers an updated reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late work as a philosophy of systems and outlines some fertile philosophical concepts and methods developed by Merleau-Ponty in The visible and the Invisible. (...) Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm, understood from a systems perspective, and his method of the hyperdialectic are applied in a child case study of an infant who suffered severe neglect in a Romanian orphanage. (shrink)

Background: Clinical and experimental findings have suggested that insomnia is associated with altered emotion processing, such as facial emotion recognition and impairments in executive functions. However, the results still appear non-consensual and have recently been presented by a few number of studies. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether patients with Insomnia disorder will present alterations in recognition of facial emotions and that such alterations will be related to Executive Functions and that Insomnia Disorder patients will (...) exhibit a lower Executive Functions performance when compared to normal controls individuals. Method: A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with insomnia disorder and 15 control participants took part in the present cross-sectional study. They completed questionnaires covering socio-demographic data, a sleep and mood evaluation, and a cognitive assessment. Moreover, they underwent a computerized Facial Emotional Recognition test, consisting of facial emotion labeling and facial emotion matching. Results: Individuals with insomnia presented a lower recognition of facial expressions of fear and sadness in comparison to control volunteers. Perceptual Organization Index was found to be statistically significant lower in the insomnia group compared to the control group. There was a statistically significant association between facial recognition emotional and cognitive processes of in executive functions performance, especially in processes related to the inhibitory control, planning capacity, problem solving and cognitive flexibility in insomnia group. Conclusions: Insomnia disorder impairs the facial emotion recognition of the fear and sadness. Insomniacs with impairment in the facial emotion recognition had impaired performance of executive functions. There is a negative impact on processes related to cognitive-emotional capacity than on processes related to social-emotional recognition. Keywords: insomnia, facial emotional recognition, sleep deprivation, cognition, executive functions. (shrink)

Why think that emotions are kinds of evaluations? This chapter puts forward an original account of emotions as evaluations apt to circumvent some of the chief difficulties with which alternative approaches find themselves confronted. We shall proceed by first introducing the idea that emotions are evaluations (sec. I). Next, two well-known approaches attempting to account for this idea in terms of attitudes that are in and of themselves unemotional but are alleged to become emotional when directed towards evaluative contents are (...) explored. According to the first approach, emotions are nothing but evaluative judgments. Sec. II reminds the reader of the problems associated with this idea: one of its consequences is to deprive creatures with limited cognitive capacities of any sort of partaking of emotional life. According to the second approach, which is often praised for its capacity to avoid the pitfalls facing an appeal to evaluative judgments, emotions are perception-like experiences of evaluative properties and are as such within the reach of creatures bereft of conceptual capacities. This perceptual theory is taken up in sect. III, in which we explain why it remains unsatisfactory insofar as it shares with the evaluative judgement theory the idea that what makes emotions evaluations is the specific contents that they have. On this basis, we proceed by outlining in sect. IV an alternative—the attitudinal theory of emotions. Its main point of departure from current theorizing about the emotions consists in elucidating the fact that emotions are evaluations not in terms of what they represent, but rather in terms of the sort of attitude subjects take towards what they represent. We explore here what sorts of attitudes emotions are and defend the idea that they are felt bodily attitudes. (shrink)

Many prisoners in solitary confinement experience adverse psychological and physical effects such as anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, headaches, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. Psychiatrists call this SHU syndrome, named after the Security Housing Units [SHU] of supermax prisons. While psychiatric accounts of the effects of supermax confinement are important, especially in a legal context, they are insufficient to account for the phenomenological and even ontological harm of solitary confinement. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of space (...) in supermax confinement by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeal depth. I argue that the prolonged deprivation of concrete experiences of spatial depth in a shared world is a form of violence against the relational structure of embodied (inter)subjectivity, and that it threatens to undermine the prisoner’s capacity for a meaningful relation to the world, to others, and even to herself. Nevertheless, some prisoners have developed strategies for resisting this psychopathology of space. (shrink)

In contrast to the recent trend of taking external world skepticism as a narrow problem for a demanding conception of "objective" or "certain" knowledge about the world, my thesis offers a re-examination of the distinctively perceptual basis of the skeptical problem. On my view the skeptic challenges the very possibility of rationally justifying beliefs in so far as they are based on sense experience, a characterization that helps to explain the continuity into the modern period of the ancient skeptical (...) challenge to the pretensions of reason. What is newly radical in external world skepticism is the discovery of the inner realm of the mind, and hence, of inner states as a component of every sense experience. ;I argue that the skeptic relies upon a distinctive, intuitively compelling, conception of sense experience which I call the causal model of experience. This is the view that experience is constituted by self-standing subjective experiences and their external causes, where cause and effect are logically distinct existences. The causal model is not to be identified with a view of perception as epistemically mediated by a "veil of ideas", though it can lead one to embrace that doctrine. My aim is twofold: to understand the motivation for the skeptic's causal model of experience; and to show that, when thought through, this model can ultimately be shown to be incoherent. ;The causal model has its roots in 17th century scientific metaphysics and the idea that the world can be exhaustively explained in terms of mechanical interactions between primary-qualified corpuscles governed by mathematically describable laws. I argue that the perceptual relation is not a mere efficient causal relation and I show that the skeptic is in the incoherent position of wanting a "private" language to describe his subjective experiences despite insisting on conditions of autonomy that deprive his terms of the normativity that is a necessary condition of meaning. Thus I do not answer the skeptical problem so much as undercut the basis upon which it is posed in the first place. (shrink)

Several theories link consciousness to complex cortical dynamics, as suggested by comparison of brain signal diversity between conscious states and states where consciousness is lost or reduced. In particular, Lempel-Ziv complexity, amplitude coalition entropy and synchrony coalition entropy distinguish wakefulness and REM sleep from deep sleep and anesthesia, and are elevated in psychedelic states, reported to increase the range and vividness of conscious contents. Some studies have even found correlations between complexity measures and facets of self-reported experience. As suggested by (...) integrated information theory and the entropic brain hypothesis, measures of differentiation and signal diversity may therefore be measurable correlates of consciousness and phenomenological richness. Inspired by these ideas, we tested three hypotheses about EEG signal diversity related to sleep and dreaming. First, diversity should decrease with successively deeper stages of non-REM sleep. Second, signal diversity within the same sleep stage should be higher for periods of dreaming vs. non-dreaming. Third, specific aspects of dream contents should correlate with signal diversity in corresponding cortical regions. We employed a repeated awakening paradigm in sleep deprived healthy volunteers, with immediate dream report and rating of dream content along a thought-perceptual axis, from exclusively thought-like to exclusively perceptual. Generalized linear mixed models were used to assess how signal diversity varied with sleep stage, dreaming and thought-perceptual rating. Signal diversity decreased with sleep depth, but was not significantly different between dreaming and non-dreaming, even though there was a significant positive correlation between Lempel-Ziv complexity of EEG recorded over the posterior cortex and thought-perceptual ratings of dream contents. (shrink)

During the last fifteen years or so there has been much debate, among philosophers interested in perception, on the question of whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or nonconceptual. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have challenged the terms of this debate, arguing that one of its most basic assumptions is mistaken. Experience, they claim, does not have representational content at all. On the kind of approach they suggest, having a perceptual experience is not to (...) be understood on the model of thought or belief, as a matter of the subject's taking things in the world to be this or that way, or of having this or that feature. Nor is it to be understood on the model of receiving testimony about how things are in the world, as a matter of its being represented to us that things are this or that way. Rather, it is simply a matter of our being presented with things. Having a perceptual experience of an object is a matter of our standing in a certain kind of relation to it which makes it available to us to be represented in thought or belief, but which does not itself involve our representing it, or its being represented to us.1 Much of the motivation for rejecting the view that experience has representational content springs from a concern to do justice to what is distinctive about perceptual experience in contrast to thought and belief. In particular, perceptual experience seems to be more "primitive" than thought, in that it seems natural to appeal to the character of perceptual experience to explain the possibility of thought about objects rather than the other way around. There is thus a concern that we will deprive.. (shrink)

When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner (...) in which their bodies will move—details an intention alone leaves unsettled. This requires, among other things, that we reject views on which agents’ control is identical with their practical rationality. When all goes well, agents attentionally prioritize what is motivationally relevant to them to the exclusion of what would otherwise distract them from achieving their goals. However, sometimes agents attend distractedly—i.e., without prioritizing. As the aim of attention is to avoid distraction, this entails the possibility of defective attention. Defective attention, in turn, casts light on scenarios in which agents lose control over what they are doing, as when a skilled practitioner ‘chokes under pressure’. A complaint sometimes levelled against accounts, like mine, that claim to reduce agents’ control of their behaviour to that of causally efficacious mental states or events is that these accounts invariably deprive agents themselves of their rightful role in the generation of behaviour. This is the “Disappearing Agent Problem” for “reductive” or “event-causal” theories of action. I argue that, correctly understood, extant reductive theories do face a genuine Disappearing Agent Problem. However, it is a problem we solve by recognizing the role that conscious attention plays in making an action the agent’s own. Accordingly, I develop and defend an attentional account of action ownership. On this view, allocating conscious attention in service of your goals is sufficient for a kind of conscious perspective (“motivational perspective”), which, when active in controlling your behaviour, constitutes the behaviour as your own doing. As I explain, such perspective also contributes to explaining the subjective structure of your perceptual awareness of the world around you. (shrink)

IN A recent work I have attempted to show that visual space tends to have a Euclidean geometrical structure only when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly faceted objects carpentered to exhibit simple standard Euclidean shapes, and tends to have a hyperbolic structure when vision is deprived of these clues. I conclude that visual perception--and by analogy, all perception--is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but the character (...) of its response is also hermeneutical, that is, it has the capacity to "read" the appropriate structures in the World, and to form perceptual judgments of the World about which these "speak." The clues that are "read" perceptually as giving a Euclidean visual space are engineered objects, such as streets and buildings with repetitive architectural elements. These scientific artifacts of human culture belong to a family of readable technologies central to the phenomenological and existential-hermeneutical analysis of natural science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 63-80 [Access article in PDF] The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick Above all (and this is a corollary, but an important one), the phenomenological and praxiological analysis of cultural trajectories must allow to be grasped at once a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it by dint of moving and cutting across (...) them. --Michel de Certeau, Culture in the PluralThrough his rigorous examinations of the common, the quotidian, the personal, the plural practices that establish and continually transform societies, Michel de Certeau develops a conception of culture born of the perpetual transgression, however subtle or pronounced, of the boundaries imposed by all totalizing systems, whether theoretical or social. This view of culture as a "cutting across" of boundaries, which can be found in many forms throughout his work, achieves a special significance for the study of subjectification in his discussion of "Spatial Practices" that comprises the third section of The Practice of Everyday Life. In an important essay on Certeau's theory of space, Ian Buchanan argues that "our understanding of culture must commence with an understanding of the formation of the subject," and that the latter is addressed by Certeau through his essays on space [129-30]. Following this assertion, we want to argue that Certeau's analyses of spatial practices in Heterologies, "The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa," and The Practice of Everyday Life [particularly the chapter "Walking in the City" 91-110], outline a theory that describes subjectivity as what amounts to, as Certeau puts it in Culture in the Plural, "a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it by dint of moving and cutting across them" [146]. Furthermore, by articulating the close relationship between Certeau's spatial theory and our own work on "transversal movement," we will attempt to show that the method of analysis Certeau uses in "Walking in the City" (and describes in several other works) is itself marked by the "transversal" tactics that his theory describes. 1 By focusing in particular on Certeau's methodological critique of Foucault in both The Practice of Everyday Life and Heterologies, we will demonstrate the various ways in which he moves beyond what Bryan Reynolds and James Intriligator have labeled the "dissective-cohesive mode" of analysis, an analytical [End Page 63] [Begin Page 65] approach (characteristic of most dialectical argumentation) that breaks its subject matter into constituent parts and examines those parts with the goal of reassembling them into a unified and accountable whole (such as, say, the city or the human subject in "Walking in the City"). 2 Postmodern Space: Certeau and Jameson In his essay "Heterophenomenology, or Certeau's Theory of Space," Ian Buchanan situates Certeau's writings on the production of space within the postmodern debate over the autonomy of the subject, opposing Certeau's view to Fredric Jameson's "assumption that the subject takes his or her psychic bearings from the built environment and only has certain existence so long as he or she can cognitively 'map' this environment" [Buchanan 114]. Citing the example of the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, Jameson argues that "this latest mutation in space--postmodern hyperspace--has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world" [44]. The effect on cultural politics, according to Jameson, is that the subject "submerged" by this postmodern hyperspace is deprived of the "critical distance" that makes possible the "positioning of the cultural act outside of the massive Being of capital" [48]. Buchanan finds in "Walking in the City" the basis for a critique of this view though a conception of space stemming from "heterophe-nomenology," defined as "a phenomenology predicated by a heterogeneously constituted subject which does not take for granted the unity of the body" [112]. Focusing on Certeau's debt to Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception (which can best be seen in... (shrink)

Our private perception of listening to an individualized playlist during a jog is very different from the interaction we might experience at a live concert. We do realize that music is not necessarily a performing art, such as dancing or theater, while our demands regarding musical performances are conflicting: We expect perfect sound quality and the thrill of the immediate. We want the artist to overwhelm us with her virtuosity and we want her to struggle, just like a human. We (...) want to engage with the musical expression and rely on visual and physical cues. Considering that the ears of today's listeners are used to technologically mediated music, in this paper I explore the unique qualities of musical live performances and examine if our conception allows for new mechatronic inventions, in particular robotic musicians, to participate in this art form. Some of Godlovitch's main thoughts expounded in his work on "musical performance" [11] serve as a reference and starting point for this investigation. His concept of `personalism', which deprives computer-/program-based musical performances from expressive potential and creative accomplishment is an issue that I want to challenge by pointing out new approaches arising from a reective discourse on technology, embodiment and expression. The enquiry conducted illustrates, how in reasoning about machine performers and algorithmic realization of music, we also examine the perceptual, physical and social aspects of human musicianship, reconceptualizing our understanding of a musical live performance. (shrink)

Previous studies have demonstrated that orientation-specific deprivation in early life can lead to neural deficits of spatial vision in certain space, and can even result in meridional amblyopia. Individuals with astigmatism are the optimal and natural models for exploring this asymmetric development of spatial vision in the human visual system. This study aims to assess the contrast sensitivity function and EEG signals along two principal meridians in participants with regular astigmatism when being optimal optical corrected. Twelve participants with astigmatism (...) and thirteen participants with were recruited in the current study. CSFs and spatial sweep visual evoked potentials were measured with vertical and horizontal sinewave gratings along two principal meridians monocularly. Area under log CSF, spatial frequency threshold corresponding to 80% contrast gratings, and CSF acuity were calculated from CSF test. In addition, sVEP amplitudes and thresholds were calculated with the recursive least square method. Participants with astigmatism exhibited marked vertical-horizontal resolution disparities even after they were corrected with optimal optical corrections. CSF tests showed that AULCSF along weak meridian was lower than that along strong meridian in both groups. Significant meridional disparity of CSF acuity was also found in both groups. In addition, the MA group showed larger meridional disparity compared to the AST group. Spatial sVEP thresholds also supported the existence of marked meridional disparity. Our results suggest that meridian-specific partial deprivation in early life might lead to monocularly asymmetric development of spatial vision in the human visual system. In terms of application, we tested the feasibility and reliability of adopting psychophysical and EEG scalings to investigate the asymmetric development of spatial vision related to astigmatism. These paradigms are potentially applicable to reduce and even eliminate the meridional disparity in the primary visual cortex by adopting perceptual learning or other vision-related interventions. (shrink)

The first premise of Schellenberg’s particularity argument reads, “If a subject S perceives a particular α, then S discriminates and singles out α” (2018: 25). But this is false if seeing a ganzfeld is possible (i.e., a homogeneous field without any particulars to discriminate). In response, Schellenberg argues that seeing a ganzfeld is impossible by appealing to the ganzfeld effect (viz. hallucinatory experiences caused by ganzfeld exposure) exclusively as a ‘sense of blindness’. I present two challenges for this line of (...) reasoning. The first concerns the need to account for the long delay before blindness is reported (if it is reported at all) and the second concerns the need to be consistent with potential causes of ganzfeld hallucinations (in general, not exclusive to the sense of blindness). I show how Schellenberg’s particularity argument can meet the first challenge but struggles to meet the second. I present evidence based on considerations related to sensory deprivation and that follow from the predictive processing theory of cognition, which describes seeing a ganzfeld as the cause of ganzfeld hallucinations. If correct, this means that you can see a homogeneous field, and thus we ought to be skeptical of the soundness of Schellenberg’s particularity argument. I conclude with a possible strategy for rehabilitating the particularity argument that reconceptualizes perceptual experience as fundamentally multimodal, constituted by both exteroceptive and interoceptive sensation. (shrink)

The risks of harm to nonhuman primates, and the absence of benefits for them, are critically important to decisions about nonhuman primate research. Current guidelines for review and practice tend to be permissive for nonhuman primate research as long as minimal welfare requirements are fulfilled and human medical advances are anticipated. This situation is substantially different from human research, in which risks of harms to the individual subject are typically reduced to the extent feasible. A risk threshold is needed for (...) the justification of research on nonhuman primates, comparable to the way risk thresholds are set for vulnerable human subjects who cannot provide informed consent. Much of the laboratory research conducted today has inadequate standards, leading to common physical, psychological, and social harms. (shrink)

Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of the relationship between (...) color and physical reality. -/- Chirimuuta offers an overview of philosophy’s approach to the problem of color, finds the origins of much of the familiar conception of color in Aristotelian theories of perception, and describes the assumptions that have shaped contemporary philosophy of color. She then reviews recent work in perceptual science that challenges philosophers’ accounts of color experience. Finally, she offers a pragmatic alternative whereby perceptual states are understood primarily as action-guiding interactions between a perceiver and the environment. The fact that perceptual states are shaped in idiosyncratic ways by the needs and interests of the perceiver does not render the states illusory. Colors are perceiver-dependent properties, and yet our awareness of them does not mislead us about the world. Colors force us to reconsider what we mean by accurately presenting external reality, and, as this book demonstrates, thinking about color has important consequences for the philosophy of perception and, more generally, for the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Our perceptual systems are not stagnant but can learn from experience. Why is this so? That is, what is the function of perceptual learning? I consider two answers to this question: The Offloading View, which says that the function of perceptual learning is to offload tasks from cognition onto perception, thereby freeing up cognitive resources (Connolly, 2019) and the Perceptual View, which says that the function of perceptual learning is to improve the functioning of perception. (...) I argue that the Perceptual View better explains data from infants and animals, and better accounts for learned tasks that only perception could perform. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe and Anthony Kenny disagree on whether or not it is possible to doubt the existence of one’s own body. Anscombe believes that such doubt makes sense while Kenny argues that it could make sense only if one supposed that he had become a bodyless Cartesian ego. To resolve the issue I explore the knowledge one acquires of himself, and thus the manner in which such knowledge might be weakened into doubt. Siding with Anscombe, I argue that under the (...) conditions of sensory deprivation some very basic questions asked of oneself such as, “Which body?” cannot be answered. Without such answers, one can be uncertain about his own body. Such uncertainty, however, is to be explained by the autonomy of the relevant ‘J-thoughts’ and not because one had become a Cartesian ego. (shrink)

A range of contemporary voices argue that negative affective states like distress and anxiety can be morally productive, broaden our epistemic horizons and, under certain conditions, even contribute to social progress. But the potential benefits of stress depend on an agent’s capacity to constructively interpret their affective states. An inability to do so may be detrimental to an agent’s wellbeing and mental health. The broader political, cultural, and socio-economic context shapes the kinds of stressors agents are exposed to, but it (...) also delineates the hermeneutic equipment they have available to interpret their stress. To explain this specific problem of conceptual deprivation, philosophical theories on wellbeing and anxiety need to move beyond individualist perspectives. (shrink)

The brain requires sustained interaction with a rich physical and social environment to stay healthy. Individuals without access to such enabling environments and who instead live and grow in disabling environments tend to have greater risk of developing dementia. But research and policymaking as regards dementia risk reduction have so far focused almost exclusively on the role of how individuals’ health behaviors change their risk profile. This exclusive focus on “lifestyle” is both ethically problematic and therapeutically inadequate. I highlight a (...) growing literature on three different kinds of deprivation, an independent and overlooked risk factor for dementia that invites upstream action against inequalities. Future prevention guidelines should include explicit mention of deprivation as a risk factor and be developed around the need to make society fairer. Meanwhile, interventions and discourse based on lifestyle modification should respect the principle of “no ought without support.”. (shrink)

There are obvious flaws in REM sleep suppression paradigms that do not allow any conclusion to be drawn either pro or contra the REM sleep-memory hypothesis. However, less intrusive investigations of REM sleep suggest that this sleep stage or its adjunct neuroendocrine characteristics exert a facilitating influence on certain aspects of ongoing memory formation during sleep. [Nielsen; Vertes & Eastman].

At a time when there is a health care crisis in the United States, there is widespread appeal to religious healing of various types. Adequate research in this area is limited.Terms such as "ecstasy" are used inconsistently, limiting the usefulness of the term, producing confusion rather than understanding. A cross‐cultural comparative perspective is offered.

Although it is a welcome and timely idea, the behavioural constellation of deprivation needs to explain how the development of personal control, trust, and perception of future risk is mediated through relationships with parents. Further, prioritising the present over the future may not be the essence of this constellation; perhapsnotquite being, either in the presentorin the future, is a better depiction.