Ego states

The ego is one of the most central psychological constructs in psychedelic research and a key factor in psychotherapy, including psychedelic-assisted forms of psychotherapy. Despite its centrality, the ego-construct remains ambiguous in the psychedelic literature. Therefore, we here review the theoretical background of the ego-construct with focus on its psychodynamic conceptualization. We discuss major functions of the ego including ego boundaries, defenses, and synthesis, and evaluate the role of the ego in psychedelic drug action...

The typical near-death experience (NDE) is generally understood as an altered state of consciousness in which the experient has the impression of existing as an extrapersonal self out of and/or away from their physical body during real or presumed life-threatening and/or near-death circumstances. This presumed extrapersonal self can sometimes have a perception of being located within the proximity of the physical body whereas at other times it is under the assumption of having ventured to a transcendental location such as an otherworldly realm...

OBJECTIVES: Previous research has investigated potential synergies between classic psychedelics and meditation practice, but relatively little remains known about the relationship between classic psychedelic experiences and engagement with meditation practice.The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between classic psychedelic experiences and engagement with two popular types of meditation: mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness or compassion meditation. METHODS: This retrospective, population-based observational study included 2,822 respondents aged 18 years or older in the United States...

BACKGROUND: The Reflective Impulsive Model of Strack and Deutsch (2004) is a dual-process model and could be a dynamic theoretical framework of sexual risk behavior that is able to predict condom use under different circumstances. If we apply the Reflective Impulsive Model to sexual risk behavior, implicit attitudes regarding sexual risk behavior should have a stronger impact on behavior when working memory capacity is low. Explicit attitudes have a strong impact on intentions, which diminishes as participants have less working memory capacity...

It is hypothesized that being mindfully aware is a spontaneous state of being. It is imbued with joy, peace and happiness. Such a state is periodically revealed during restful attentiveness or presence. It is also associated with spontaneous brain alpha activity of 8-13 Hz. In deep nonrapid eye movement sleep, there is synchronous delta activity at a coherent frequency of 0.1 Hz. Both of these brainwave ground states are spontaneous, calm and effortless. When any physical or mental effort is made, the alpha rhythm is desynchronized, and it is superposed by faster brain waves of beta (13-30 Hz) and gamma frequencies (30-150 Hz)...

Philosophers maintain that touch confers a sense of reality or grounding to perceptual experience. In touching oneself, one is simultaneously both subject and object of touch, a template for experiencing oneself as subject and object of intentions, feelings, and motivations, or intersubjectivity. Here, I explore a form of self-touch carefully documented by Winnicott in observing how the infant engages the transitional object. I compare the processes of self-loss in transitional states, including absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization...

The main aim of the study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the Sports Anxiety scale-2 (SAS-2). The study covered 396 athletes, ages ranging from 18 years to 35 years. The task and ego orientation in sport questionnaire (TEOSQ) and State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) were used for validation of the scale. Cronbach's alpha for the somatic anxiety subscale was 0.88, for the worry subscale was 0.95, and for the concentration disruption was 0.86, respectively. The three-factor model and hierarchical model fits perfectly as CFI > 0...

Encoding a driving scene into vector representations has been an essential task for autonomous driving that can benefit downstream tasks e.g., trajectory prediction. The driving scene often involves heterogeneous elements such as the different types of objects (agents, lanes, traffic signs) and the semantic relations between objects are rich and diverse. Meanwhile, there also exist relativity across elements, which means that the spatial relation is a relative concept and need be encoded in a ego-centric manner instead of in a global coordinate system...

INTRODUCTION: Much research has focused on the modeling of the near-death experience (NDE) by classical and atypical psychedelics; however, to date, no study has reported on the relationship between the NDE and the experience induced by the highly potent, endogenous psychedelic drug 5-Methoxy-DMT (5MeO-DMT). This article presents a case study of an individual who is popularly documented to have had a profound near-death experience while in a coma caused by bacterial meningoencephalitis...

This study investigated the sense of familiarity attributed to N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experiences. 227 naturalistic inhaled-DMT experiences reporting a sense of familiarity were included. No experiences referenced a previous DMT or psychedelic experience as the source of the familiarity. A high prevalence of concomitant features discordant from ordinary consciousness were identified: features of a mystical experience (97.4%), ego-dissolution (16.3%), and a "profound experience of death" (11.0%). The Sense of Familiarity Questionnaire (SOF-Q) was developed assessing 19 features of familiarity across 5 themes: (1) Familiarity with the Feeling, Emotion, or Knowledge Gained; (2) Familiarity with the Place, Space, State, or Environment; (3) Familiarity with the Act of Going Through the Experience; (4) Familiarity with Transcendent Features; and (5) Familiarity Imparted by an Entity Encounter...

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 disease spread at an alarming rate, and was declared a pandemic within 5 months from the first reported case. As vaccines have become available, there was a global effort to attain about 75% herd immunity through vaccination. There is a need to address the issue of vaccine hesitancy to COVID-19 vaccines especially in places such as Sub-Saharan African countries which have a high rate of background vaccine hesitancy. OBJECTIVE: To determine the knowledge and acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines among healthcare workers (HCWs) in Enugu metropolis...

This paper presents a novel architecture to generate a world model in terms of mesh from a continuous image stream with depth information extracted from a robot's ego-vision camera. We propose two algorithms for planar and non-planar mesh generation. A Cartesian grid-based mesh fitting algorithm is proposed for mesh generation of planar objects. For mesh generation of non-planar objects, we propose a Self Organization Map based algorithm. The proposed algorithm better approaches the boundary and overall shape of the objects compared to State-Of-the-Art (SOA)...

Ego depletion refers to the state of low self-control ability as defined by the limited resource model of self-control. The ego depletion aftereffects scale (EDA-S) is a relatively mature tool for evaluating ego depletion. However, the internal structure of EDA-S is not clear. A deeper understanding of its internal structure, especially the core variables, is required to design better interventions to improve people's ego depletion outcomes and self-control. In the present study, we estimated an unregularized partial correlation network of ego depletion in a sample of 499 male young adults in China, who participated in the EDA-S test, and calculated the centrality index...

BACKGROUND: Thoraco-abdominal surgery cuts through muscle, disrupting the normal structure and function of the respiratory muscles, resulting in lower lung volumes and a higher risk of developing post-operative pulmonary complications (PPC). PPC remains an important cause of post-operative morbidity and mortality and impacts the long-term outcomes of patients after hospital discharge. This study was aimed at determining the incidence and factors associated with postoperative pulmonary complications among patients who underwent thoracic and upper abdominal surgery in the Amhara region of Ethiopia...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy represents a promising tool for GI cancer screening. However, the limited field of view and uneven skills of endoscopists make it remains difficult to accurately identify polyps and follow up on precancerous lesions under endoscopy. Estimating depth from GI endoscopic sequences is essential for a series of AI-assisted surgical techniques. Nonetheless, depth estimation algorithm of GI endoscopy is a challenging task due to the particularity of the environment and the limitation of datasets...

In social interactions, emotional biases can arise when the emotional state of oneself and another person are incongruent. A person's ability to judge the other's emotional state can then be biased by their own emotional state, leading to an emotional egocentric bias (EEB). Alternatively, a person's perception of their own emotional state can be biased by the other's emotional state leading to an emotional altercentric bias (EAB). Using a modified audiovisual paradigm, we examined in three studies (n = 171; two online & one lab-based study) whether emotional biases can be considered traits by measuring two timepoints within participant and relating empathy trait scores to emotional biases, as well as the electrophysiological correlates of emotional biases...

Cross-network node classification (CNNC), which aims to classify nodes in a label-deficient target network by transferring the knowledge from a source network with abundant labels, draws increasing attention recently. To address CNNC, we propose a domain-adaptive message passing graph neural network (DM-GNN), which integrates graph neural network (GNN) with conditional adversarial domain adaptation. DM-GNN is capable of learning informative representations for node classification that are also transferrable across networks...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a potent classic serotonergic psychedelic, which facilitates a variety of altered states of consciousness. Here we present the first meta-analysis establishing dose-response relationship estimates of the altered states of consciousness induced by LSD. Data extracted from articles identified by a systematic literature review following PRISMA guidelines were obtained from the Altered States Database. The psychometric data comprised ratings of subjective effects from standardized and validated questionnaires: the Altered States of Consciousness Rating Scale (5D-ASC, 11-ASC) and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30)...

Consumption of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca is a central ritualistic aspect of the Santo Daime religion. The current observational, baseline controlled study was designed to assess whether members (n = 24) of the Santo Daime church would show enhanced capacity for mental imagery during an ayahuasca experience. In addition, this study assessed whether the effects of ayahuasca on consciousness and mental imagery were related to peak serum concentration of N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the main psychoactive component...

Inertial localisation is an important technique as it enables ego-motion estimation in conditions where external observers are unavailable. However, low-cost inertial sensors are inherently corrupted by bias and noise, which lead to unbound errors, making straight integration for position intractable. Traditional mathematical approaches are reliant on prior system knowledge, geometric theories and are constrained by predefined dynamics. Recent advances in deep learning, which benefit from ever-increasing volumes of data and computational power, allow for data-driven solutions that offer more comprehensive understanding...