Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
April 30, 2020
Karl Friston, Wanja Wiese, J Allan Hobson
This essay addresses Cartesian duality and how its implicit dialectic might be repaired using physics and information theory. Our agenda is to describe a key distinction in the physical sciences that may provide a foundation for the distinction between mind and matter, and between sentient and intentional systems. From this perspective, it becomes tenable to talk about the physics of sentience...
Sleep Medicine Reviews
April 1, 2015
Martin Dresler, Renate Wehrle, Victor I. Spoormaker et al.
The idea that dreaming can serve as a model for psychosis has a long and honourable tradition, however it is notoriously speculative. Here we demonstrate that recent research on the phenomenon of lucid dreaming sheds new light on the debate. Lucid dreaming is a rare state of sleep in which the dreamer gains insight into his state of mind during dreaming. Recent electroencephalogram (EEG) and...
Frontiers in Psychology
October 9, 2014
J Allan Hobson, Charles C-H Hong, Karl Friston
This article explores the notion that the brain is genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality generator that - through experience-dependent plasticity - becomes a generative or predictive model of the world. This model, which is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming, may provide the theater for conscious experience. Functional neuroimaging evidence for brain...
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
November 2009
J Allan Hobson
Dreaming has fascinated and mystified humankind for ages: the bizarre and evanescent qualities of dreams have invited boundless speculation about their origin, meaning and purpose. For most of the twentieth century, scientific dream theories were mainly psychological. Since the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the neural underpinnings of dreaming have become increasingly well...
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
January 15, 2006
J Allan Hobson
AbstractAdvances in, and links between, neurobiology and psychology as applied in the study of sleep and dreaming compared to the waking state are increasingly revealing significant evidence for the brain basis of consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 15, 2004
David Kahn, J Allan Hobson
Thinking is known to be state dependent but a systematic study of how thinking in dreams differs from thinking while awake has not been done. The study consisted of analyzing the dream reports of 26 subjects who, in addition to providing dream reports also provided answers to questions about their thinking within the dream. Our hypothesis was that thinking in dreams is not monolithic but has...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
2003
Magdalena J Fosse, Roar Fosse, J Allan Hobson et al.
The activity that takes place in memory systems during sleep is likely to be related to the role of sleep in memory consolidation and learning, as well as to the generation of dream hallucinations. This study addressed the often-stated hypothesis that replay of whole episodic memories contributes to the multimodal hallucinations of sleep. Over a period of 14 days, 29 subjects kept a log of...
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
September 2002
J Allan Hobson, Edward F Pace-Schott
Sleep can be addressed across the entire hierarchy of biological organization. We discuss neuronal-network and regional forebrain activity during sleep, and its consequences for consciousness and cognition. Complex interactions in thalamocortical circuits maintain the electroencephalographic oscillations of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Functional neuroimaging affords views of the human...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2002
David Kahn, Edward F Pace-Schott, J Allan Hobson
This study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Thirty-five subjects provided 320 dream reports and answers to questions on characters that appeared in their dreams. We found that emotions are almost always evoked by our dream characters and that they are often used as a basis for identifying them. We found that affection and joy were commonly...