A&O – CONSCIOUSNESS – DREAMS

ART & ORGANISM

CONSCIOUSNESS

DREAMING

 

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I like the image of angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder. it is a good metaphor for information travelling back-and-forth between the subconscious and conscious mind. 

• SLEEP is but one of many forms of consciousness and dreaming is involves changes in the brain that help us understand the diversity of neuronal mechanisms that must collaborate … in “awake” consciousness, “…as the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views.  Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.   (Wm. James, The Principles of Psychology, Ch. 9, 1890).   (from A&O notes on alternative states of cosnsciousness) …but dream consciousness builds on the extraordinary internally-generated inputs to the mechanisms that weave narrative from available information.

   

• For a review of the diverse interpretations of data on dreams and their proximate causation and interpretation: READ “Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology” by Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi  (nice collection of dreaming/consciousness literature by Tonini)

Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology    Dreams are a most remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that our brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate by itself an entire world of conscious experiences. Content analysis and developmental studies have furthered our understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging, and neurophysiology have advanced our knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research in order to address some fundamental questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception.” (Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi 2010 Complete essay HERE)

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• AS we consider waking consciousness, the brain functions likely to be important in sleep and dream consciousness suggest the interactions and complexities of parallel and serial processing that go on at all times in the diverse states of consciousness we manifest.

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This is the “activation-synthesis model”  referred to in a paper by Nir & Tononi’s paper from about 10 years ago.  You should check it out:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814941/ :

Trends Cogn Sci. 2010 Feb; 14(2): 88.   Published online 2010 Jan 14. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001  PMCID: PMC2814941  NIHMSID: NIHMS165848  PMID: 20079677 

 APPRECIATE that many anomalies of dreaming (such as a feeling of falling or unable to move) may be because these usually synchronized processes can get a little out of synch.  ALSO, check into: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/10/scientists-identify-parts-of-brain-involved-in-dreaming

 

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“We now know that dreams are the result of localised firing of neurons that is probably induced by the brain’s many feedback connections and not dependent on information from external stimuli. Dreaming represents a unique physiological state in which activity similar to that we see when we are awake is promoted while behaviour is essentially cut off by powerful chemical systems that induce paralysis.  …   From a deep-learning perspective, learning isn’t like storing memories on a computer. Instead, it is about fine-tuning a huge, layered network of connections based on an inherently limited set of example data – the “training” data set. With every example that the system sees, the pattern and strength of the network’s connections are tweaked until it can parse the training data set effectively, which would be things like classifying images, playing a game or driving a car. (Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833073-600-how-the-strangeness-of-our-dreams-reveals-their-true-purpose/#ixzz7OkbWZ6aI) 

“The self-organization theory of dreaming proposes that the sleeping brain is a self-organizing system that can combine discontinuous and incongruous neuronal signals (i.e., different elements of dreams) into a relatively continuous narrative during sleep (Kahn and Hobson, 1993; Kahn et al., 2000, 2002). This theory also implies that dreams are not independently functional but rather a coproduct of the sleeping brain, reflecting the dreamer’s physiological and psychological activities such  as memory consolidation, emotion regulation, and reception of external stimuli “(Zhang, 2016)[i]  Read Zhang’s 2016 article, spelling out the converging influences on dreams and seeking reconciliation with FREUD’s View. 

• Freud also believed that “Sources of dreams include stimuli from the external world, subjective experiences, organic stimuli within the body, and mental activities during sleep (p. 22). Zhang points out that “…empirical evidence has supported some of these assertions. The self-organization theory of dreaming posits that memory consolidation, emotion regulation, and reception of external stimuli can contribute to dream content (Zhang, 2016); hence, dream content can contain important information about the dreamer.”

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(do you beieve (as did Freud and the Surrealists) that it is true that dreams are Non Impediti Ratione Cogitationis (unencumered by the thought process))

 

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