Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Marie-Thérèse Saurat, Maité Agbakou, Patricia Attigui et al.
To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking (46%), running (8.6%), dancing (8%), standing up (6.3%), bicycling (6.3%), and...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Miranda Occhionero, Piera Carla Cicogna
Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are complex experiences that include the visual illusory reduplication of one's own body. From a phenomenological point of view, we can distinguish three conditions: autoscopic hallucinations, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences. The dysfunctional pattern involves multisensory disintegration of personal and extrapersonal space perception. The etiology, generally...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Allan Hobson, Ursula Voss
Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the...
Sleep Medicine
December 2011
Roberto Vetrugno, Pasquale Montagna
Sleep is a coordinated process involving more or less simultaneous changes in sensory, motor, autonomic, hormonal, and cerebral processes. On the other hand, none of the changes occurring with sleep are invariably coupled to sleep. EEG synchrony, heat loss, sleep-related hormone secretion, and even REM-related motoneuron paralysis may occur independent of the parent state. In REM sleep...
Chronobiology international
December 1, 2011
Isabelle Arnulf, Agnès Brion, Michel Pottier et al.
Cloistered monks and nuns adhere to a 10-century-old strict schedule with a common zeitgeber of a night split by a 2- to 3-h-long Office (Matins). The authors evaluated how the circadian core body temperature rhythm and sleep adapt in cloistered monks and nuns in two monasteries. Five monks and five nuns following the split-sleep night schedule for 5 to 46 yrs without interruption and 10...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Reza Amini, Catherine Sabourin, Joseph De Koninck
Scientific study of dreams requires the most objective methods to reliably analyze dream content. In this context, artificial intelligence should prove useful for an automatic and non subjective scoring technique. Past research has utilized word search and emotional affiliation methods, to model and automatically match human judges' scoring of dream report's negative emotional tone. The current...
Archives italiennes de biologie
December 1, 2011
I Arnulf
Rapid eye movements (REMs) and visual dreams are salient features of REM sleep. However, it is unclear whether the eyes scan dream images. Several lines of evidence oppose the scanning hypothesis: REMs persist in animals and humans without sight (pontine cats, foetus, neonates, born-blinds), some binocular REMs are not conjugated (no focus point), REMs occur in parallel (not in series) with the...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Michael Schredl
Dreaming in patients with schizophrenia was and is of particular interest to researchers and clinicians due to the phenomenological similarities between the dreaming state and schizophrenic daytime symptomatology such as bizarre thoughts or hallucinations. Extensive literature reviews have shown that dream studies in the field of psychopathology often do not fulfill common scientific criteria....
Current Biology
November 8, 2011
Martin Dresler, Stefan P. Koch, Renate Wehrle et al.
Since the discovery of the close association between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and dreaming, much effort has been devoted to link physiological signatures of REM sleep to the contents of associated dreams [1-4]. Due to the impossibility of experimentally controlling spontaneous dream activity, however, a direct demonstration of dream contents by neuroimaging methods is lacking. By...
Journal of Neural Transmission
November 2011
Paulo Bugalho, Teresa Paiva
Few studies have investigated the relation between dream features and cognition in Parkinson's disease (PD), although vivid dreams, hallucinations and cognitive decline have been proposed as successive steps of a pathological continuum. Our objectives were therefore to characterize the dreams of early stage PD and to study the relation between dream characteristics, cognitive function, motor...