Conceptual coordination bridges information processing and neurophysiology

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'.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Information processing theories of memory and skills can be reformulated in terms of how categories are physically and temporally related, a process called conceptual coordination. Dreaming can then be understood as a story-understanding process in which two mechanisms found in everyday comprehension are missing: conceiving sequences (chunking categories in time as a higher-order categorization) and coordinating across modalities (e.g., relating the sound of a word and the image of its meaning). On this basis, we can readily identify isomorphisms between dream phenomenology and neurophysiology, and explain the function of dreaming as facilitating future coordination of sequential, cross-modal categorization (i.e., REM sleep lowers activation thresholds, “unlearning”). [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms; Revonsuo; Vertes & Eastman]