Conceptual coordination bridges information processing and neurophysiology
Behavioral and Brain Sciences December 1, 2000 William J. Clancey 5 citations
Memory and skill learning can be understood as how categories are physically and temporally related, a process called conceptual coordination. Dreaming is a story-understanding process missing two mechanisms of everyday comprehension: conceiving sequences (chunking categories in time as higher-order categorization) and coordinating across modalities (e.g., relating a word's sound to its meaning's image). This explains isomorphisms between dream phenomenology and neurophysiology, and suggests dreaming facilitates future coordination of sequential, cross-modal categorization, with REM sleep lowering activation thresholds or 'unlearning'.