Imaging the Subjective

Aesthetic experiences can be deeply personal. Given this subjectivity, how can cognitive neuroscience characterize the neural mechanisms supporting intense aesthetic experiences? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Vessel, Starr, and Rubin measured brain responses as observers viewed a diverse set of artworks and rated how aesthetically “moving” they found each artwork. Although individual observers expressed highly divergent aesthetic tastes, imaging results identified several regions consistently more engaged by moving artworks, including nodes of the default-mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions implicated in internally directed mentation. This work increased interest in the DMN and the role of internally directed thought in aesthetic experiences and helped to shift the focus of inquiry from single regions to network interactions. A result of close interaction between humanists and neuroscientists, the paper under discussion captured more of the richness of aesthetic experiences than was common in neuroimaging experiments. The authors hope that this legacy continues to inform future work.

Prefrontal contributions to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience

The human prefrontal cortex is a structurally and functionally heterogenous brain region, including multiple subregions that have been linked to different large-scale brain networks. It contributes to a broad range of mental phenomena, from goal-directed thought and executive functions to mind-wandering and psychedelic experience. Here we review what is known about the functions of different prefrontal subregions and their affiliations with large-scale brain networks to examine how they may differentially contribute to the diversity of mental phenomena associated with prefrontal function. An important dimension that distinguishes across different kinds of conscious experience is the stability or variability of mental states across time. This dimension is a central feature of two recently introduced theoretical frameworks—the dynamic framework of thought (DFT) and the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) model—that treat neurocognitive dynamics as central to understanding and distinguishing between different mental phenomena. Here, we bring these two frameworks together to provide a synthesis of how prefrontal subregions may differentially contribute to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience. We close by considering future directions for this work.

Drifting and Directed Minds: The Significance of Mind-Wandering for Mental Agency

Perhaps the central question in action theory is this: what ingredient of bodily action is missing in mere behavior? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask this: what ingredient of active, goal-directed thought is missing in mind-wandering? My answer: attentional guidance. Attention is guided when you would feel pulled back from distractions. In contrast, mind-wandering drifts between topics unchecked. My unique starting point motivates new accounts of four central topics about mental action. First, its causal basis. Mind-wandering is a case study that allows us to tease apart two causes of mental action––guidance and motivation. Second, its experiential character. Goals are rarely the objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions and relevant information. Third, its scope. Intentional mind-wandering is a limit case of action where one actively cultivates passivity. Fourth, my theory offers a novel response to mental action skeptics like Strawson.

Interactions between the neural correlates of dispositional internally directed thought and visual imagery

Cognition is not always directed to the events in the here and now and we often self-generate thoughts and images in imagination. Important aspects of these self-generated experiences are associated with various dispositional traits. In this study, we explored whether these psychological associations relate to a common underlying neurocognitive mechanism. We acquired resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a large cohort of participants and asked them to retrospectively report their experience during the scan. Participants also completed questionnaires reflecting a range of dispositional traits. We found thoughts emphasizing visual imagery at rest were associated with dispositional tendency towards internally directed attention (self-consciousness and attentional problems) and linked to a stronger correlation between a posterior parietal network and a lateral fronto-temporal network. Furthermore, decoupling between the brainstem and a lateral visual network was associated with dispositional internally directed attention. Critically, these brain–cognition associations were related: the correlation between parietal–frontal regions and reports of visual imagery was stronger for individuals with increased connectivity between brainstem and visual cortex. Our results highlight neural mechanisms linked to the dispositional basis for patterns of self-generated thought, and suggest that accounting for dispositional traits is important when exploring the neural substrates of self-generated experience (and vice versa ). This article is part of the theme issue ‘Offline perception: voluntary and spontaneous perceptual experiences without matching external stimulation’.

The Epistemic Significance of Tradition

This chapter discusses the contribution of tradition to the spiritual life. It begins by reviewing the implications of the work of Anselm and Aquinas for our understanding of these matters, before proposing that the notion of hybrid goods offers a further way of thinking about the role of tradition. Notably, traditioned patterns of thought may be important if a community is to be able to test hypotheses about the nature and extent of the relations of congruence that may hold between various theological narratives and our world-directed thought, experience, and behaviour. We contrast this vision of the role of tradition with the much thinner role that is implied in Hadot’s account of the spiritual life, noting how a difference of view about the nature of spiritual goods can drive a difference of view about the place of traditioned forms of enquiry in the spiritual life.

Interactions between the neural correlates of dispositional internally directed thought and visual imagery

Cognition is not always directed to the events in the here and now and we often self-generate thoughts and images in imagination. Important aspects of these self-generated experiences are associated with various dispositional traits. In this study, we explored whether these psychological associations relate to a common underlying neurocognitive mechanism. We acquired resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a large cohort of participants and asked them to retrospectively report their experience during the scan. Participants also completed questionnaires reflecting a range of dispositional traits. We found thoughts emphasising visual imagery at rest were associated with dispositional tendency towards internally directed attention (self-consciousness and attentional problems) and linked to a stronger correlation between a posterior parietal network and a lateral fronto-temporal network. Furthermore, decoupling between the brainstem and a lateral visual network was associated with dispositional internally directed attention. Critically, these brain-cognition associations were related: the correlation between parietal-frontal regions and reports of visual imagery was stronger for individuals with increased connectivity between brainstem and visual cortex. Our results highlight neural mechanisms linked to the dispositional basis for patterns of self-generated thought, and suggest that accounting for dispositional traits is important when exploring the neural substrates of self-generated experience (and vice versa).

Drifting and Directed Minds: The Significance of Mind-Wandering for Mental Action

Perhaps the central question in action theory is this: what ingredient of bodily action is missing in mere behaviour? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask the following: what ingredient of active, goal-directed, thought is missing in mind-wandering? I answer that guidance is the missing ingredient that separates mind-wandering and directed thinking. I define mind-wandering as unguided attention. Roughly speaking, attention is guided when you would feel pulled back, were you distracted. In contrast, a wandering attention drifts from topic to topic unchecked. From my discussion of mind-wandering, I extract general lessons about the causal basis, experiential character, and limits of mental action. Mind-wandering is a case study that allows us to tease apart two causal bases of mental action––guidance and motivation––that often track together and are thus easy to conflate. The contrast between mind-wandering and active thinking also sheds light on how goals are experienced during mental action. Goals are rarely the objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions (which we are guided away from) and relevant information (which we are guided towards). Finally, I account for a puzzling case of mental action that psychologists call “intentional mind-wandering”.

Augustine’s Defence of Knowledge Against the Sceptics

In his Contra Academicos, Augustine offers one of the most detailed responses to scepticism to have come down to us from antiquity. In this paper, I examine Augustine’s defence of the existence of infallible knowledge in Contra Academicos 3, focusing on his semantic response to external world scepticism and his appeal to mathematical knowledge to argue against the sceptical thesis that nothing is known. I challenge a number of established views concerning the nature and merit of Augustine’s defence of knowledge and propose a new understanding of several important elements of Augustine’s thought concerning signification, cognition, and object-directed thought. I argue that once we properly understand Augustine’s views on these matters his arguments in defence of knowledge are more interesting and more successful than usually thought.

James on Percepts, Concepts, and the Function of Cognition

Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. This chapter focuses initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricism” and metaphysics of “pure experience” (neutral monism) around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “given” and the “knowledge relation” or “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally.