Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2013
Ursula Voss, Karin Schermelleh-Engel, Jennifer Windt et al.
A new scale, the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams scale (LuCiD), distinguishes lucid from non-lucid dreams using eight factors: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors relate to dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differ between lucid and non-lucid dreams, indicating that lucid insight is separate from dream bizarreness or changes in subjective realism. The scale was developed through exploratory factor analysis on data from a first survey and validated with confirmatory factor analysis on a second survey.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2012
Antonio Zadra, Geneviève Robert
People differ widely in how often they recall dreams, and part of that variation may come from how recall is measured. In a study of 358 participants who estimated their weekly dream recall and then kept either a narrative log (165 people) or a checklist log (193 people) for 2–5 weeks, dream recall frequency peaked early in the first week for both log types and then stayed stable. The two groups did not differ in their estimated recall, but narrative logs produced significantly fewer reported dreams per week. Only checklist logs yielded significantly higher recall than participants' initial questionnaire estimates. The pattern held across people with low, medium, or high baseline recall.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2012
Delphine Oudiette, Marie-José Dealberto, Ginevra Uguccioni et al.
Suppressing REM sleep with the antidepressant clomipramine (50 mg) in 11 healthy young men did not substantially affect dream recall, including report length, complexity, bizarreness, pleasantness, or self-perception of dream or thought-like mentation. REM sleep was suppressed by a marked 81% (range 39-98%). The persistence of long, complex, and bizarre dreams even after partial or total REM suppression suggests that the generation of mental activity during sleep is independent of sleep stage.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2012
Madelijn Strick, Tirza H J Van Noorden, Rients R Ritskes et al.
Across two experiments using different research paradigms, Zen meditation improved access to unconscious information. Zen practitioners who meditated in the lab outperformed those who did not on the Remote Associate Test, a measure of creative problem-solving. In a second task, meditating Zen practitioners showed greater use of subliminally primed words compared to non-meditating practitioners. The findings suggest that Zen meditation enhances the ability to bring accessible but unconscious information into awareness.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2012
Tadas Stumbrys, Daniel Erlacher, Melanie Schädlich et al.
Lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is aware of dreaming and can often influence the dream, is a learnable skill. A systematic review of 35 studies (11 in sleep laboratories, 24 in the field) evaluated techniques for inducing lucid dreams. Most studies (26) tested cognitive techniques, 11 used external stimulation, and one applied a drug. The overall methodological quality of the studies was low. No induction technique was verified to reliably and consistently induce lucid dreams, though some appeared promising. The review presents a taxonomy of methods and discusses methodological issues and future research directions.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2012
Christopher T Burris, John K Rempel
Reading a tragic news story about a needy other tended to increase self-reported mystical experiences. Among men, a history of mystical experience was associated with greater empathy, but this empathy was not connected to the mystical experiences they reported during the study. For women, a history of mystical experience did not predict empathy overall, but their empathy was linked to in-the-moment experiences of oneness, absorption, and space-time distortion with religious significance. The findings suggest emotional empathy may be tied to altered perceptions of self in relation to others and context.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2012
Philip Goff
Zombies are physical duplicates of humans without consciousness, while ghosts are phenomenal duplicates whose nature is entirely conscious. Although zombie arguments against physicalism are well-known in philosophy of mind, ghostly arguments have been neglected. This paper argues that ghostly arguments hold several dialectical advantages over zombie arguments. It then explains how the conceivability of ghosts conflicts with two forms of a priori physicalism: analytic functionalism and the Australian physicalism of Armstrong and Lewis.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2012
The philosophical interpretation of the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) as a neutral, correlation-based enterprise is mistaken. While Chalmers characterized NCC research as correlating conscious experience with neural representations, the actual experimental paradigms and explanatory standards of neuroscience presuppose a causal, mechanistic relationship between brain activity and consciousness. The author argues that NCC research is better understood as an attempt to locate causally relevant neural mechanisms, not merely discrete representations whose contents correlate with experience. The first "C" in NCC should thus stand for "causes" rather than "correlates."
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2012
Justin Sytsma, Edouard Machery
The authors previously argued that ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as having phenomenal qualities, which undermines a common justification for the hard problem of consciousness. Here, they respond to Talbot's criticism of their earlier argument, defending their position against the challenge.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
J G Taylor
Evidence from fMRI, MEG, and EEG recordings shows a neural signal occurring about 200 milliseconds after a stimulus appears, located mainly in parietal and extra-striate visual areas, which appears to be a copy of the command that shifts attention. This signal, termed a corollary discharge of attention movement, is observed before subjects report their conscious experience. The authors suggest this finding offers a promising path for investigating the link between attention control signals and human consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Reza Amini, Catherine Sabourin, Joseph De Koninck
Adding word associations to a machine learning model improved its ability to automatically score the emotional tone of dream reports. Using a sample of 458 dreams, the model's accuracy for detecting negative emotional tone rose from 59% to 63%, and it achieved 77% accuracy for positive emotional tone for the first time. Word associations were based on how often words co-occur with their definitions in a dictionary and encyclopedia.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Michael Schredl
Dreaming in people with schizophrenia has long interested researchers because of similarities between dream experiences and daytime symptoms like bizarre thoughts and hallucinations. However, many dream studies in psychopathology fail to meet standard scientific criteria. This paper examines methodological problems—sampling methods, dream collection, and content analysis—that affect the validity of findings. The authors propose a dimensional approach that directly links the severity of daytime symptoms to specific dream characteristics, which could help identify which schizophrenia symptoms are most closely connected to dream content.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2011
Joel Krueger
Social cognition may be partly constituted by physical interactions with the environment, not just neural processes. The extended mind thesis, which holds that cognitive processes can include manipulating environmental structures, is applied to social understanding. The author argues that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management—negotiating and managing "we-space"—and that expressive actions like gesture, touch, and facial expressions do genuine social-cognitive work. Drawing on gesture studies, developmental psychology, and Moebius Syndrome research, the paper challenges the Theory of Mind paradigm and suggests that social interaction is a kind of extended social cognition, driven by environmental scaffolding.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2011
Mark Blagrove, Josie Henley-Einion, Amanda Barnett et al.
The dream-lag effect describes a pattern where memories from the previous day are frequently incorporated into dreams, followed by a lower incorporation of memories from 2 to 4 days earlier, and then a higher incorporation of memories from 5 to 7 days earlier. In a study with 8 female participants who kept daily and dream diaries for 14 days, ratings of matches between dream reports and diary records showed a significant dream-lag effect for the 5-7 day period compared to baseline and the 2-4 day period. This suggests a possible memory processing function for sleep reflected in dream content. Both participants' and independent judges' ratings confirmed a significant day-residue effect.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2011
Michelle Neider, Edward F Pace-Schott, Erica Forselius et al.
Greater lucidity in dreams is linked to better performance on a task that engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (the Iowa Gambling Task), but not on a task engaging the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the Wisconsin Card Sort Task). In a prospective study of 28 high school students, those with higher lucidity scored significantly higher on the Iowa Gambling Task. No differences were found in sleep quality or baseline characteristics. The findings suggest a connection between lucid dreaming and ventromedial prefrontal function.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 11, 2011
C. Kerr, J. Shaw, L. Conboy et al.
Placebo acupuncture, where needles rest on the skin without penetrating, can relieve chronic pain, yet the mechanism is unclear. This qualitative study interviewed patients from a randomized trial on irritable bowel syndrome, focusing on their unprompted descriptions of enhanced touch sensations. In five of six cases, patients linked sensations such as warmth and tingling to treatment effectiveness. The authors propose a "neurophenomenological" account of the placebo effect, suggesting that attentional filtering dynamically affects early sensory cortices, potentially explaining the healing response.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Zoran Josipovic
The wide range of meditation techniques across contemplative traditions makes it difficult to classify them using modern cognitive science concepts. Travis and Shear propose adding 'automatic self-transcending' to the existing categories of 'focused attention' and 'open monitoring', using characteristic EEG bands as the defining criteria for each category. The accuracy of current taxonomies and potential limitations of using EEG measurements as classifying criteria are discussed.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Félix-Antoine Lusignan, Roger Godbout, Marie-Josée Dubuc et al.
Dream recall frequency after NonREM and REM sleep awakenings was similar for patients with schizophrenia and controls, matching values for healthy participants. Patients' NonREM sleep narratives were shorter than controls'. Both groups' NonREM reports had fewer words and reportable items compared to their REM reports. Controls more often reported bizarreness in REM than NonREM reports, a difference not seen in patients. Overall, NonREM sleep mentation differed little between groups, and sleep stage cognitive style was comparable, with NonREM reports being more thought-like, less elaborate, and less bizarre than REM reports.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2009
Nirit Soffer-Dudek, Golan Shahar
Sleep-related experiences, such as nightmares, lucid dreams, and problem-solving dreams, are distinct from other altered-consciousness tendencies like dissociation and transliminality. Transliminality—a trait involving heightened sensitivity to subconscious material—predicted both general sleep-related experiences and lucid dreaming over time. Psychological distress and increased life stress predicted a rise in general sleep-related experiences over a three-month period. The findings suggest that transliminality contributes to individual differences in sleep experiences, while general sleep experiences result from psychological distress and life stress.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2008
George A. Mashour, Eric LaRock
Philosophical p-zombies are imagined beings that behave like humans but lack consciousness, used to challenge physicalist theories of mind. Inverting this concept yields i-zombies: beings that appear unconscious but are actually conscious. A real-world approximation of i-zombies exists in anesthesia awareness, where 1-2 per 1000 patients under general anesthesia become conscious during surgery despite appearing unconscious due to paralysis and intubation. Additionally, 22% of patients in a recent study reported dreaming during anesthesia. P-zombies raise the hard problem of explaining qualia; i-zombies pose the practical problem of detecting qualia. The work compares these concepts and examines the hard problem of unconsciousness through anesthesia awareness.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2008
David Gamez
This review organizes the field of machine consciousness into four areas to clarify its goals, connections to other disciplines, and prior research. It addresses criticisms, potential benefits, and methods for evaluating whether systems exhibit signs of consciousness. The paper also considers social and ethical implications of machine consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2007
Allan Hobson, David Kahn
Dream reports from normal subjects cannot reliably identify the individual dreamer. Judges asked to group dream reports by their authors performed at chance levels, indicating that dreams may share more common features than unique signatures. When personal identifiers such as names and gender of friends and family are removed, dream reports do not reveal the dreamer's identity. The findings suggest that beyond using dreams to understand individuals, they also reveal shared or generic aspects of human consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2006
Murray Shanahan
A brain-inspired cognitive architecture is proposed that approximates consciousness, imagination, and emotion. It uses a model from global workspace theory to mimic the superior cognitive efficacy of conscious over non-conscious information processing in the mammalian brain. Anticipation and planning are achieved through internal simulation of environmental interaction, and affect mediates action selection in both real and simulated interactions. An implementation using weightless neurons controls a simulated robot.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2006
Rocco J Gennaro, Douglas J Herrmann, Michael Sarapata
Everyday memory failures, such as forgetting to put on a tie for a formal meeting, can be understood through the concept of the "unity of consciousness." The authors argue that perfect unity among mental states is rare and that minor breakdowns in this unity cause common memory lapses. After reviewing philosophical ideas about unity of consciousness and functionalism, they propose a "unity model" of memory failure, which explains how disruptions lead to inappropriate behavior. They distinguish these failures from slips of action and other cognitive failures, and contend that their model is preferable to alternatives like Absentmindedness or Multimodal models and is consistent with experimental results.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2005
Katja Valli, Antti Revonsuo, Outi Pälkäs et al.
The threat simulation theory (TST) proposes that dreaming evolved as a biological defense mechanism to rehearse threat perception and avoidance, enhancing reproductive success. A key prediction is that real-life threats should increase the frequency and severity of threatening dreams. Analyzing dream reports from severely traumatized Kurdish children, less traumatized Kurdish children, and non-traumatized Finnish children supported most TST predictions. Severely traumatized children reported significantly more dreams, a higher number of threatening dream events, and threats that were more severe in nature compared to less traumatized or non-traumatized children.