Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2013
Jana Speth, Clemens Frenzel, Ursula Voss
We present Activity Analysis as a new method for the quantification of subjective reports of altered states of consciousness with regard to the indicated level of simulated motor activity. Empirical linguistic activity analysis was conducted with dream reports conceived immediately after EEG-controlled periods of hypnagogic hallucinations and REM-sleep in the sleep laboratory. Reports of...
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
September 1, 2013
Marjolein Van Duijl, Wim Kleijn, Joop De Jong
30 citations
As in many cultures, spirit possession is a common idiom of distress in Uganda. The DSM-IV contains experimental research criteria for dissociative and possession trance disorder (DTD and PTD), which are under review for the DSM-5. In the current proposed categories of the DSM-5, PTD is subsumed under dissociative identity disorder (DID) and DTD under dissociative disorders not elsewhere...
Science Translational Medicine
August 14, 2013
Adenauer G. Casali, Olivia Gosseries, Mario Rosanova et al.
1,299 citations
One challenging aspect of the clinical assessment of brain-injured, unresponsive patients is the lack of an objective measure of consciousness that is independent of the subject's ability to interact with the external environment. Theoretical considerations suggest that consciousness depends on the brain's ability to support complex activity patterns that are, at once, distributed among...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 16, 2013
David Kahn
Through dreaming, a different facet of the self is created as a result of a self-organizing process in the brain. Self-organization in biological systems often happens as an answer to an environmental change for which the existing system cannot cope; self-organization creates a system that can cope in the newly changed environment. In dreaming, self-organization serves the function of...
Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
June 25, 2013
Dagna Skrzypińska, Barbara Szmigielska
12 citations
Aim. The aim of this theoretical study is to present common phenomenological and neurobiological features of schizophrenia and REM sleep. Results. A review of professional literature was conducted in order to synthesize current findings about associations between schizophrenia and REM sleep. Many researches reveal that both states share some common phenomenological and neurobiological features....
American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis
June 19, 2013
Anne Diamond
“This book is about the psychedelic potential of dreams” (p. 30). J. Allan Hobson uses his own brain and its dreams to provide a “unified theory of consciousness” that ties dreaming, dissociative s...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
June 18, 2013
Ho Ming Chow, Silvina G. Horovitz, Walter S. Carr et al.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep constitutes a distinct "third state" of consciousness, during which levels of brain activity are commensurate with wakefulness, but conscious awareness is radically transformed. To characterize the temporal and spatial features of this paradoxical state, we examined functional interactions between brain regions using fMRI resting-state connectivity methods....
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
March 5, 2013
Lampros Perogamvros
A scientific study of consciousness should take into consideration both objective and subjective measures of conscious experiences. To this date, very few studies have tried to integrate third-person data, or data about the neurophysiological correlates of conscious states, with first-person data, or data about subjective experience. Inspired by Morel's invention (Casares, 1940), a literary...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2013
Ursula Voss, Karin Schermelleh-Engel, Jennifer Windt et al.
In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2013
Adrian R Morrison
The recognition of rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) and its association with dreaming in 1953 by Aserinsky and Kleitman opened a new world to explore in the brain. Discussions at two major symposia in the early 1960s reveal that a state with characteristics resembling both wakefulness and sleep was overturning accepted views of the regulation of the two states. Participants grappled with the idea...