PLoS One
July 23, 2020
Joshua M. Martin, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Natália Bezerra Mota et al.
41 citations
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are typically longer, more vivid, and more story-like than those from non-REM sleep, but traditional measures may be confounded by report length. By analyzing 133 dream reports from 20 participants as non-semantic directed word graphs, researchers found that REM dream reports have greater connectedness—words recur with longer range—compared to N2 sleep reports. Graph measures predicted dream complexity, with higher connectedness and lower randomness linked to more complex reports. The largest connected component improved models using report length alone for predicting sleep stage and complexity. Graph analysis offers an automated method to complement traditional dream report analysis.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
October 15, 2019
Mariza van Wyk, Mark Solms, Gosia Lipinska
37 citations
People who frequently recall their dreams spend more time awake during the night, particularly after waking from stage 2 non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, compared to those who rarely recall dreams. A study of 36 healthy adults using overnight brain-wave recordings found that high dream recallers had more awakenings overall and more prolonged awakenings from NREM stage 2 sleep, but did not differ from low recallers in the number of awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep or in REM density, a measure of brain activity linked to dream production.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 18, 2024
Mariza van Wyk, Mark Solms, Gosia Lipinska
1 citation
A new method uses sentiment analysis to objectively measure moment-by-moment positive and negative emotions in dream reports. In a pilot study of 14 dream reports collected after overnight sleep monitoring, researchers applied a sentiment-analysis tool (VADER) to generate continuous emotion ratings across each dream. They developed six novel emotion indicators, including the number of emotional peaks and troughs, overall emotion intensity, and an emotion gradient showing the direction of emotional change. Five of these six indicators correlated with sleep, mood, or personality measures linked to dreaming and emotion regulation. The findings suggest these indicators may serve as proxies for emotion regulation processes within dreams, offering a foundation for future research with larger samples.
Brain structure & function
April 28, 2026
Saúl Sal-Sarria, Mark Solms, Oliver H Turnbull
The origins of consciousness may lie not in the cerebral cortex but in ancient subcortical systems responsible for affective experience, particularly the ascending arousal networks of the upper brainstem and the periaqueductal gray. These structures sustain wakefulness and imbue it with valence, positioning consciousness as an embodied biological function grounded in feeling rather than higher cognition. From a developmental perspective, these subcortical structures mature relatively early in gestation, suggesting that a primitive form of subjective feeling may emerge during the third trimester, before cortical maturation. This view has ethical implications for debates on fetal pain perception, neonatal care, and treatment of individuals with profound cognitive impairment.
iScience
December 25, 2020
Anjali Tarun, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Virginie Sterpenich et al.
During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the brain's large-scale functional networks show a surprising pattern: nearly all networks are most active during NREM stage 2, then abruptly lose activity in NREM stage 3. However, despite this high activity in stage 2, the functional connections and mutual dependencies between networks progressively break down as sleep deepens. This means that even though networks attempt to communicate during stage 2, the efficiency of information transfer is low. The findings advance neural models of sleep and consciousness by showing that network integrity, not just activity levels, is crucial for conscious awareness.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2018
Mark Solms
The article applies the free energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. It argues that the elemental form of consciousness is affect, located in the upper brainstem via an extended form of homeostasis. This mechanism is formalized as free energy minimization in unpredicted contexts, where decreases in expected uncertainty are felt as pleasure and increases as unpleasure. The work emphasizes why such existential imperatives feel like something to and for an organism.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
October 1, 2017
Steve Paulson, Siri Hustvedt, Mark Solms et al.
Three experts—a writer, a historian of psychology, and a neuropsychologist—discuss how unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings might be willfully brought into conscious awareness, whether this unveiling leads to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment, and whether the unconscious can be methodically tapped for creative inspiration. They explore how an expanded understanding of consciousness might help people flourish, think beyond preconceived categories, and frame spiritual experiences or offer spiritual nourishment. The conversation covers noetic experiences, intuition, peak experiences, and Jung's collective unconscious.
Journal of Integrative Neuroscience
June 1, 2014
Mark Solms
A neuropsychoanalytical approach to the hard problem of consciousness prioritizes the subject over objects of consciousness. The subject is the indispensable foundation upon which consciousness of objects is inscribed. Subjective being is not registered in classical exteroceptive modalities; rather, those modalities are registered within subjectivity. Cognitive representations are mental solids embedded in subjectivity, and these solids are no more real than the subjective being they inhabit. Pure subjectivity has content and quality, conventionally described as level of consciousness or wakefulness, but it feels like something to be awake. Affect supplies the subjectivity that underpins all consciousness.