arXiv Preprint ArchiveSeptember 29, 2020Yunshu Du, Garrett Warnell, Assefaw Gebremedhin et al.
preprint
Experience replay (ER) improves the data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by allowing an agent to store and reuse its past experiences in a replay buffer. While many techniques have been proposed to enhance ER by biasing how experiences are sampled from the buffer, thus far they have not considered strategies for refreshing experiences inside the buffer. In this...
Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon that can be classified as altered state of consciousness. In the last years the scientific interest for it has grown exponentially. To understand how the research on this topic evolved during the time, bibliometric and network analyses were performed. The focus of the analysis was on: 1) papers; 2) authors; 3) countries and 4) collaborations. Scopus database was...
The words uttered by the eponymous protagonist of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601), “To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause” (3.1.64–67), are almost always read as thoughts of suicide that analogize dreaming sleep to death. 1 Yet it seems possible to take them also...
Lucid dreaming-the phenomenon of experiencing waking levels of self-reflection within one's dreams-is associated with more wake-like levels of neural activation in prefrontal brain regions. In addition, alternating periods of wakefulness and sleep might increase the likelihood of experiencing a lucid dream. Here we investigate the association between sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming, with...
The outcome of the survey of 981 respondents on phase state (PS): lucid dreaming (LD), sleep paralysis (SP), out-of-body experiences (OBE), and false awakening (FA). The survey took place in Moscow, Russia (March 16-17, 2019) Survey The study took place on March 16th and 17th, 2019 in the form of a live survey on the streets of Moscow, Russia. A group of nine assistants was instructed to ask...
This chapter covers essential knowledge about lucid dreaming, which includes the psychological meaning of lucid dreaming, how to induce lucid dreaming and how it can be used therapeutically for self-growth. Ways to induce lucid dreaming are through incubating a lucid dream, by linking waking states to dream states, by overcoming fears and resistances to lucid dreaming and by looking for...
The reliable induction of lucid dreams is a challenge in lucid dream research. In a previous study by our research group we were able to induce in about 50% of the participants a lucid dream in a single sleep laboratory night by combining a wake-up-back-to-bed sleep protocol and a mnemonic technique. In the present study, we extended our previous procedure by additional presentation of an odor...
Dreams in which the dreamer is aware of the dream state (lucid dreams, LD) are difficult to induce in naïve subjects in-laboratory. Recently, Stumbrys and Erlacher (2014) used a combination of existing induction techniques together with a self-developed experiment protocol and achieved comparatively high LD induction rates. In this study, we simplified their methodology slightly and repeated...
Neurophysiological correlates of self-awareness during sleep ('lucid dreaming') remain unclear despite their importance for clarifying the neural underpinnings of consciousness. Transcranial direct (tDC) and alternating (tAC) current stimulation during sleep have been shown to increase dream self-awareness, but these studies' methodological weaknesses prompted us to undertake additional study....
Lucid dreaming is a unique phenomenon with potential applications for therapeutic interventions. Few studies have investigated the effects of lucidity on an individual's waking mood, which could have valuable implications for improving psychological wellbeing. The current experiment aims to investigate whether the experience of lucidity enhances positive waking mood, and whether lucidity is...