•  65
    Felt presence: the uncanny encounters with the numinous Other (review)
    with Elena Frantova and Tore Nielsen
    AI and Society 26 (2): 171-178. 2011.
    Felt presence, a sensation that “someone is there”, is an integral part of our everyday experience. It can manifest itself in a variety of forms ranging from most subtle fleeting impressions to intense hallucinations of demonic assault or visions of the divine. Felt presence phenomenon outside of the context of neurological disorders is largely neglected and not well understood by contemporary science. This paper focuses on the experiential and expressive qualities of the phenomenon and attempts…Read more
  •  48
    Extra-personal awareness through the media-rich environment
    with Elena Frantova and Timothy Sutton
    AI and Society 26 (2): 179-186. 2011.
    The richness and subtlety of the felt presence phenomenon introduced by “Felt Presence: the uncanny encounters with the numinous Other” (Solomonova et al., this issue) offers a challenge to the emerging field of new media. How to create a computer-mediated environment which can engender a spontaneous, creative, and individualized experience such as felt presence? The Other experiment described in this paper explores the possibility of unfolding phenomenological and poetic aura of felt presence e…Read more
  •  38
    Sensed presence as a correlate of sleep paralysis distress, social anxiety and waking state social imagery
    with Tore Nielsen, Philippe Stenstrom, Valérie Simard, Elena Frantova, and Don Donderi
    Consciousness and Cognition 17 (1): 49-63. 2008.
    Isolated sleep paralysis is a common parasomnia characterized by an inability to move or speak and often accompanied by hallucinations of a sensed presence nearby. Recent research has linked ISP, and sensed presence more particularly, with social anxiety and other psychopathologies. The present study used a large sample of respondents to an internet questionnaire to test whether these associations are due to a general personality factor, affect distress, which is implicated in nightmare sufferin…Read more
  •  28
    Upshot: This interdisciplinary work draws on phenomenology, Indian philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, cognitive neurosciences and a variety of personal and literary examples of conscious phenomena. Thompson proposes a view of consciousness and self as dynamic embodied processes, co-dependent with the world. According to this view, dreaming is a process of spontaneous imagination and not a delusional hallucination. This work aims at laying the ground for systematic neurophenomenological investigation …Read more
  •  21
    Access and Mediation: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Attention (edited book)
    with Maren Wehrle and Diego D’Angelo
    De Gruyter. 2022.
    This volume proposes an interdisciplinary framework that views attention from a particular angle: as a means of accessing, that is, disclosing the world in a practical and meaningful way. Moreover, it investigates how this access is concretely mediated. The book is structured in the following two parts: 1) Attention and Access The first section is concerned with attention as such. What is attention and what does it do? A common thread between the expected contributions addresses attention as a d…Read more
  •  15
    Flying dreams stimulated by an immersive virtual reality task
    with Claudia Picard-Deland, Maude Pastor, Tyna Paquette, and Tore Nielsen
    Consciousness and Cognition 83 102958. 2020.
  •  5
    Chapter 7 The Role of Attention and Intention in Dreams
    with Michelle Carr
    In Maren Wehrle, Diego D’Angelo & Elizaveta Solomonova (eds.), Access and Mediation: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Attention, De Gruyter. pp. 163-188. 2022.
  •  3
    Different Patterns of Sleep-Dependent Procedural Memory Consolidation in Vipassana Meditation Practitioners and Non-meditating Controls
    with Simon Dubé, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière, Dasha A. Sandra, Arnaud Samson-Richer, Michelle Carr, Tyna Paquette, and Tore Nielsen
    Frontiers in Psychology 10. 2020.
    AimRapid eye movement (REM) sleep, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and sleep spindles are all implicated in the consolidation of procedural memories. Relative contributions of sleep stages and sleep spindles were previously shown to depend on individual differences in task processing. However, no studies to our knowledge have focused on individual differences in experience with Vipassana meditation as related to sleep. Vipassana meditation is a form of mental training that enhances proprioc…Read more