Jennifer Windt, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Thomas Andrillon
preprint
We spend a third of our lives asleep, and sleep teems with vivid dreams. While most people rarely remember their dreams, laboratory studies using timed awakenings show that healthy adults experience multiple dreams per night. Dreams have been hypothesised to play a key role in the development of consciousness and cognition1,2. Dreams are believed to contribute to sleep-related memory...
Anton Kleschev Alevtinowitch
preprint
This paper develops and expands the Epiphyseal Re-entry Exaptation Hypothesis (EREH), a testable evolutionary proposal concerning the emergence of purely endogenous experience in vertebrates. The central claim is that neural circuitry associated with the ancestral median photoreceptive complex was not simply lost when direct photoreception regressed, but was at least partially exapted into a...
Jeronimo Herrera
preprint
Consciousness eludes unified scientific explanation, entwining subjective experience with observable brain processes. Neural thermodynamics (NT) introduces a quantitative framework to bridge this divide, modeling consciousness through neural temperature (Tneural), energy (ΔE), and entropy (ΔS). Grounded in statistical mechanics and the Free Energy Principle, NT merges neuroscience and physics...
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Adriana Alcaraz, S.Gabriela Torres-Platas
preprint
The scientific study of lucid sleep (to retain critical self-awareness during ongoing sleep) has traditionally been focused on lucid dreaming and induction techniques primarily targeting REM sleep. Recently, there has been increasing interest in other forms of lucid sleep, such as certain episodes of sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences reported during sleep, and episodes of...
G Samuelson
preprint
Dreaming is among the most vivid demonstrations that consciousness can occur in a state of relative sensory disconnection. This paper reviews whether dream experience is better explained as an endogenous neurocognitive construction or as evidence of contact with another dimension, multiverse branch, or anomalous informational domain. The review integrates literature from the neuroscience of REM...
Ramin Bidari
preprint
This paper explores the profound relationship between energetic consciousness and the brain, arguing that consciousness is an independent force beyond time and space that utilizes the brain as a tool for experiencing reality. Unlike traditional neuroscientific perspectives that consider the brain as the source of consciousness, this study suggests that consciousness actively alters the brain’s...
Rodrick Wallace
We demonstrate that all enterprises of embodied cognition, ranging from the ‘simply’ cognitive to the conscious, and from the individual to the mechanical, institutional, and composite, are susceptible to induced patterns of hallucination, panic, and exhaustion on challenging landscapes of fog, friction, and deadly adversarial intent. We further argue, in consonance with C.S. Gray, that dreams...
M.çinar Ozcan
preprint
Large scale language models exhibit extraordinary generative performance across modalities, yet most remain architecturally monolithic: a single model performing forward pass inference. In contrast, human cognition emerges from dynamic interactions among large-scale neural networks, notably the Default Mode Network (DMN), Salience Network (SN), and Central Executive Network (CEN). We present a...
Vincent Rochas, Kevin Mammeri, Laurence Bayer et al.
preprint
Previous studies on the neural correlates of dreaming using high-density EEG (hdEEG) and the serial awakening paradigm have identified posterior brain regions related to dreaming, with maximal activity over occipital areas. Based on these results, we have hypothesized that neural activity during dreaming is mainly driven by sensory experiences (e.g., vision, audition), which predominate our...
Sergei Achimov
preprint
This paper proposes a theoretical model suggesting that the experience of dreams is linked to the process of neural network reactivation during sleep, specifically as a consequence of synaptic cleft clearance. The model argues that during periods of wakefulness, the brain operates on a much larger number of thoughts simultaneously than we are consciously aware of, with many thoughts being...