In this interview, Jennifer Windt discusses the importance of studying dreams to understand consciousness, how theories of dreaming have evolved over time, how neuroimaging has influenced the way in which we think about dreams, how we might redefine the taxonomy of conscious phenomena occurring during sleep, the role of first-person reports in dream research, her own Immersive Spatiotemporal Hallucination (ISTH) model of dreaming, as well as challenges for future research.

The plan of the Archaic city of Pompeii and the existence of a distinct walled Altstadt have been much debated in scholarship. The area of the Stabian Baths plays a key role in this debate. Based on a series of excavations in the palaestra of the baths, Heinrich Sulze (1940) and particularly Hans Eschebach (1970s) reconstructed a defensive wall and parallel ditch in this area. Eschebach also identified an Archaic street and city gate in...

High-quality, centre-based Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) benefits toddlers’ development. New research investigated the effects of the COVID-19 disruptions on attendance and learning. It showed that ECEC boosted language and thinking skills throughout the pandemic, particularly in children from less advantaged backgrounds. This shows the importance of fully-funded ECEC for developing key skills and for levelling inequalities.

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price household credit conditions through joint estimation of a system of error-correction equations for Canadian aggregate consumption, house prices and mortgage debt. We find strong evidence that, after controlling for income and household...

In this interview, Robin Carhart-Harris discusses empirical and theoretical issues related to the current renaissance of scientific research on states of consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs. In particular, he talks about the limitations of neuroimaging techniques to measure the effects of psychedelic drugs on the human brain, the reliability of self-report questionnaires to assess the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs, the nature of the phenomenon known as drug-induced ego-dissolution, the role of the default mode...

Damage introduced to graphite by mechanical polishing, argon ion beam polishing, fracture, and neutron bombardment has been studied in polycrystalline graphites and Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite (HOPG). Scanning Electron Microscopy and Atomic Force Microscopy, as well as X-Ray Diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, were employed. The least disturbed surfaces are observed in pristine HOPG or by fracturing techniques that exposed pre-existing defects. A decrease of the mean particle size of the abrading medium and the use...