Sangeetha Menon

National Institute of Advanced Studies · Faculty of Humanities

In this study, we examine three different conceptions of self within the Caraka Saṃhitā (CS), a classical Sanskrit Āyurveda text, based on three interrelated notions of suffering, well-being, and the nature of the self’s agentic pursuit of remedy. These are—(i) the phenomenal self, (ii) the expansive self, and (iii) the transcendental self. The phe...

The role of ecology in shaping notions of well-being in indigenous healing traditions is often overlooked in contemporary well-being discourse. This study examines how ecological systems contribute to notions of well-being in two Indic healing traditions– Āyurveda and the Māvilan healing traditions. We focus on the ecological place (or eco-place) a...

We live in a complex world, and the complexity exists not just in degree but in diversity that is pluralistically rich and spectral.

The emergence of self in an artificial entity is a topic that is greeted with disbelief, fear, and finally dismissal of the topic itself as a scientific impossibility. The presence of sentience in a large language model (LLM) chatbot such as LaMDA inspires to examine the notions and theories of self, its construction, and reconstruction in the digi...

This paper focuses on two indigenous healing rituals from Kerala, the South- Western state of India. The first one is uzhinjuvāngal, a ritual of warding off evil spirits. It is practised as part of the mantravāda healing tradition, at pūṅkuṭil mana, an ancestral house belonging to brahmin priests. The second is, gaddika, a ritualistic art form prac...

The study aims to address the existing research gap through a thematic comparison between the aesthetics of Kant and Abhinavagupta. This paper explores Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment based on disinterestedness with Abhinavagupta’s analysis of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa. We argue that the notions of “disinterested judgment” in Kant and sādhāraṇīkaraṇa in...

This video segments explains that consciousness is responsible for awareness that integrates the inner self and the outer world, and that the I-sense is key to understand the nature of consciousness.

This video segment explains the experiential quality in each of our conscious experiences, and how the self makes sense of the neural changes. Experiential primacy, which is the central feature of consciousness is discussed in this video.

This video segment gives the history of brain and explains how brain, mind and consciousness are related and how they work in unison.

This video segment explains easy problems and the hard problem of consciousness, and the nature and function of consciousness.

This video elucidates exciting questions in contemporary consciousness studies and brain sciences, inspiring the viewer to explore the relationship between brain, mind, and consciousness. It discusses how such interrelations provide insightful responses to understand the place of self and subjective experience. Through the video, the reader gets en...

This video segment explains how consciousness puts together various physical and mental attributes and how mind is to be distinguished from brain, and how consciousness is to be distinguished from mind and brain.

This video segment explains the nature of the connection between mind and brain, and discusses the different neuropsychological phenomena that influence our socio-cultural space.

This video segment explains the function and nature of empathy and how empathy is founded on self-awareness and theory of mind.

This video segment help you to understand how we are not only aware of oneself, but also another person, and distinguish both using “theory of mind”. The video gives examples of theory of mind from daily life.

This video segment explains the subliminal nature of self-sense and how it is connected the very sense of the I-am-ness.

This video segment explains how self-narratives are built and how we prove to be a good story-teller.

This video segment explains how our daily experiences are tied up with our ability to be self-aware.

This video segment explains that we have moved away from simplistic considerations of brain and mind, and what is important is to trace the passage from brain to the self. Further, the future of consciousness, is in how the brain and self conspire their role-play and challenge each other.

This video segment explains what is to self-reflect and what is unique about the way we think and feel for oneself.

The far-reaching, severely debilitating effects of the COVID19 pandemic, has necessitated a serious look at, and redefinition of ‘wellness’. Whether migrant labourers, working professionals, home-makers, health-care professionals or elderly citizens, everyone has had to ask themselves - ‘Am I healthy?’ ‘How do I stay healthy?’ ‘Do I feel well?’ ‘Ho...

Strong subjective factors embedded in self-existence and the non-reductive and encompassed existence of the self imply the need for imagining self-representations that are inclusive and integrated. Towards this end, arguments from philosophy of psychology, consciousness studies, literature, and material culture are presented. They facilitate unders...

Notwithstanding the fascinating contributions of philosophy, physics, and cognitive neuroscience, it is abundantly clear that we do not have even the rudiments of a scientific theory of consciousness that accounts for how matter becomes conscious or how bundling conscious experiences ends up being an experiential self. Recognizing that a crucial fi...

Traumatic spinal cord injuries from accidents cause physical and social suffering, pain and loss. After an initial period of physical and psychological trauma, the individual begins to cope and successfully crosses over. Crossing over as a term used in the spinal cord injury register refers to positive adaptation—physical, psychological and social....

Tirumular’s Tirumandiram is the earliest known Tamil treatise on yoga. This text is considered to be both, a devotional work as well as a tantric text. Unlike other major Siddha compositions, Tirumandiram does not contain any section on medicinal preparations or alchemy. It is the only Tamil text where the sections are named tanṭiram. In contrast t...

Autobiographical remembrance, ‘memories of past personal experience’, is vital for social, emotional and directive dimensions of the cognition and behaviour of an individual. This form of memory, unique to humans, is a key constituent of the concept of self, strategies for coping up with stress and thus vital to understand the wellbeing. Studies ar...

Body and self-reflection are the central concepts of yoga philosophy based on which its psychology and phenomenology of the practice of yoga is built. The goal of yoga is to situate oneself within the twin reality of matter and consciousness, body and the self. This chapter suggests that there are four aspects of self-reflection that can be deduced...

We live in a time when the emotions we possess, the identity we carry, the memories we retain, the decisions we take, the unconscious influences to which we are beholden, and the free will we exercise all impact upon the fundamental nature of our consciousness, and determine how the self and identity will express themselves or evolve in a multicult...

An intrinsic property of an object is intuitively understood as the property which the object can have independent of all other objects. The notion of an intrinsic property figures prominently in the debates over consciousness. One of the arguments for the rejection of traditional physicalism—the thesis that all reality, including qualia, are physi...

This volume brings together the primary challenges for 21st century cognitive sciences and cultural neuroscience in responding to the nature of human identity, self, and evolution of life itself. Through chapters devoted to intricate but focused models, empirical findings, theories, and experiential data, the contributors reflect upon the most exci...

Preliminary evidence suggests efficacy of yoga as add-on treatment for schizophrenia, but the underlying mechanism by which yoga improves the symptoms of schizophrenia is not completely understood. Yoga improves self-reflection in healthy individuals, and self-reflection abnormalities are typically seen in schizophrenia. However, whether yoga treat...

With the focus on the concepts of desire and self-representation, in this paper we present a philosophical analysis of the Malayalam novelette “Agnisakshi” by Lalithambika Antharjanam, which narrates the customs and taboos that existed in the Namboothiri community in Kerala in the early twentieth century. Through a method of narrative analysis supp...

Within the area of cognitive sciences and consciousness studies the primary aspect of emotion that is emphasised is the feel factor or the qualia of the experience. What makes an experience unique to the person defines its qualia and therefore is mostly inaccessible to others. The closest relative to qualia is emotion because of its person-centric...

This chapter focuses on the “ecological self” which is concerned with the relationship of the physical self and the physical environment. The ecological self is based on perception, that is, the perceiving of information from the position of the body embedded in the physical world. The ecological self also provides clues to mental states as tied to...

Consciousness has both natural and cultural histories. How over millennia a seemingly simple organ with similar set of brain molecules, neurotransmitters and synapses across insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals led to the emergence of a superior capability called consciousness in humans is a question that has persisted for many centuries. T...

This chapter brings in the philosophical riddles and experiential ironies that get surfaced by the possibility of neurogenesis and thereby change in our interactions and life experiences. Changes in brain connections and the neurochemical nexus influence cognitive skills, emotional valences, memory and mental functioning. The plasticity of the brai...

In this chapter a fundamental question is explored, namely: ‘is my inner awareness of my-self separate from my body?’ Is my body-sense separate from my self-sense? What are body-sense and self-sense? Are the self-sense and the body-sense distinct senses? A dominant approach inspired by Aristotelian thinking is that the self-sense is the body-sense....

In the sixth chapter I continue to argue for the core-self while tracing the contours of the self in the context of challenges caused to the self-sense in neuropsychiatric disorders. Our experiences tell us that the boundaries of the self-sense are flexible contributing to better or worse existences. The psychiatrically and neurologically challenge...

This chapter discusses emotions as the affective markers of experience. The bridge for social interactions is built by emotions which play the role of narrators of physical, mental, and social health for oneself and for others. When from one point of view emotions guide neural mechanisms for physiological and chemical balance, from another viewpoin...

This chapter gives a preamble to the duo of the brain and the self. Self is the single unit of information and experience that connects sensations and emotions to consciousness. And, brain is the biological organ that is often treated as an agent and director of the body which guides the working of sensation, emotion and consciousness. When on one...

The chapter on ‘The problematic of consciousness’ presents the major questions that the book addresses alongside their neurological and philosophical contexts. Biology and philosophy are the two disciplines that raise fundamental yet provoking questions about human life. The central question that these disciplines ask are centred on the notion and...

In this chapter, I explore the final frontiers in understanding consciousness, and pose the question whether we can move beyond the brain and the body. The central puzzle that consciousness studies presents to us is the existence of the evading agent and the enjoyer in and behind the experience. How is the subjective intimacy of the self and experi...

The very sense of “I and mine”, “you and yours” and “me and the other” is brought to us by the “humble” and often taken for granted presence of consciousness. Consciousness has a ubiquitous presence in our daily sensations, cognitions, feelings and memories. It is consciousness that defines and customizes experiences for us. It is consciousness tha...

This volume is a collection of 23 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the liv...

Empathy is a process involving shared attitudes, sentiments and emotions which connects individuals to one another. Such connections often are building bridges toward a unified self and one’s well-being. Multiple perspectives which include psychology, sociocultural studies, cognitive science, neurobiology, neuroscience, literary narratives, and oth...

Our natural ability to express a variety of feelings and at the same time conceptualize our feelings cognitively into the rational structures of thinking indicates that the self which we possess and cherish is somehow influenced by beliefs, hopes, attitudes, values, etc. We seek our wellbeing through the acts of choice-making, and exercise of free...

Desire and Self are the two central concepts in Indian philosophy that are discussed in detail to understand the nature of that which is possessed, that which is given up, and the agent of action. This chapter suggests that altruism is an expression of the core, deeper self, and not necessarily a behavior. Altruism is a self-expression that emerges...

Hinduism represents the religion and philosophy that originated in India. It is the religion of 16 per cent of the world's population, and India is home to more than 90 per cent of the world's Hindus. Today many historians and philosophers of science have started reviewing the dynamic events and historical processes that led to what is called the E...

The word ‘meme’ was first used by Richard Dawkins (Dawkins, 1976)1 in the sense of a replicator to introduce the idea of cultural transmission through the process of imitation, just as genes are responsible for the evolution of organisms. Following Dawkins several writers came forth to have a closer look at ‘meme’. The consensus was that this was a...