Mind Hacks

New Scientist has an intriguing article on how the study of people who have been trained to have lucid dreams may help us understand the neuroscience of consciousness.

Lucid dreams are where the sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming inside the dream. My first thought was that the combination of these and consciousness sounded a bit gimmicky but the justification seem like an interesting bit of lateral thinking with potentially valuable results:

Surprisingly, given the irrationality of the dream experience, many of the frontal areas of the brain involved in advanced cognition such as reasoning and forward planning were also active in the dreamers. But there was one notable exception: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued in REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness. To Hobson, that strongly suggests that this particular area, above other frontal regions, is crucial for the critical reflective awareness present in waking, and therefore secondary, consciousness (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 6, p 475).

Could this one brain region alone explain our secondary consciousness? It’s here that lucid dreams enter the picture. With their increased self-awareness, lucid dreams share certain aspects of secondary consciousness, so researchers are now vying to observe what happens in the brain when someone “wakes up” within their dream, and whether they exhibit any further signatures of consciousness. “It’s a very interesting leap because it can show you exactly what occurs if you jump from limited consciousness to very high consciousness,” says Victor Spoormaker of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany. “This should be one of the main themes of lucid dream research.”

The article also has some tips on making lucid dreams more likely while you sleep.

Almost every guide to lucid dreaming has the core advice that you need to get into the habit of constantly checking and asking yourself while awake ‘am I dreaming?’ presumably based on the principle that dreams often contain things we’ve experienced during the day.

One of my favourite ‘reality checks’ comes from the FAQ of the Lucidity Institute, a commercial training course set up by neuroscientist Stephen LaBerge.

It says to wear a digital watch and get used to checking it regularly at two close intervals to see if the numbers have changed as expected. If they haven’t or the numbers don’t make sense, you’re probably dreaming. Apparently checking light switches work is another technique.

No idea how rigorously these specific ideas have been tested but there is good evidence that lucid dreaming can be successfully practised and the typical lab technique to confirm it is happening is to ask participants to make specific horizontal eye movements when they become lucid.

As your eye muscles aren’t paralysed during sleep, it allows the dreamer one of the few ways they can signal to the researchers.

Link to NewSci on dreaming and consciousness (via @researchdigest).

Sleeping people are difficult to engage but easy to monitor, meaning that we know a great deal about what happens in the body and brain during our restful hours but little about the actual psychology of slumber.

One of the most interesting stages is the transition into sleep, where we can sometimes detect that our mind is changing as we slip into unconsciousness. These changes are known as the hypnagogic state and are when hallucinations are particularly common because the mind starts to ‘free up’ in poorly understood ways.

A new study has taken an interesting approach to try and understand the nature of this twilight period by using the biological measures to monitor how ‘far gone’ people are as they drift off, and then gently waking them to ask how their mind has changed.

The research team, led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, asked 20 participants to have an afternoon nap in the sleep lab while they were wired up to an EEG machine to measure electrical activity in the brain, with additional electrodes to measure eye movements, heart rate and muscle jerks.

As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ‘stage 1’ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ‘stage 2’ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ‘stage 2’ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.

The experience of having control over your own thoughts and how coherent and logical they seemed to begin to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes and they continued to seem slightly more unusual and autonomous as time went on.

However, as soon as ‘stage 2’ sleep began there was a step change into a state of mind where thoughts became markedly freewheeling, illogical and seemed to have a life of their own.

In contrast, awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ‘stage 2’ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

Most interestingly, the perception that ‘I was asleep’ when woken was most associated not with a reduced awareness of the surrounds, but instead largely relied on the experience that the sleeper no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts.

In other words, we seem to know when we’ve been sleeping because we’re quickly drawn back into the world of controlled, logical thought after gently drifting in fantasy.

Link to DOI entry and summary for study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Psychologist Paul Bloom considers why imaginary characters and fictional plots can have such a powerful emotional effect in a fantastic article for the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bloom argues that we have a form of ‘dual representation’ for fictional reveries where we engage our emotions with the characters, plot or situation as if they were real while knowing that they are not.

Does this suggest that people believe, at some level, that the events are real? Do we sometimes think that fictional characters actually exist and fictional events actually occur? Of course, people get fooled, as when parents tell their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, or when an adult mistakes a story for a documentary, or vice versa. But the idea here is more interesting than that‚Äîit is that even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it’s real…

In an important pair of papers, Gendler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it “alief.” Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, “Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!”

The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination.

It’s a wonderfully wide-ranging article that explores imagination from all angles and poses some genuinely challenging ideas about how we keep one foot either side of the fantasy divide.

Link to article ‘The Pleasures of Imagination’.

The flowers in the picture are from one of the most notorious plants in South America. Brugmansia is widespread across the continent and is strongly psychoactive causing disorientation, hallucinations and memory loss.

This is due to the fact that it contains high levels of the drug scopolamine and, as a result, it has been used for generations by many native peoples for shamanic rituals.

It is perhaps more commonly known for its criminal uses, however, particularly as a dried, powdered form, known as ‘burundanga’ where it is slipped into someone’s drink making them liable to assault, theft or worse.

There is an interesting popular belief about the drug, namely that it removes free will. The idea being that you have all your mental faculties but will do whatever is suggested to you without resistance, so criminals can get you to take out money from the cash machine or hand them the keys to your house.

This has never been tested though, so we simply don’t know, although one study indicates that scopolamine reduces our ability to keep information in mind but leaves the processes that manipulate it unaffected, perhaps suggesting that victims remain cognitively sharp, but mentally empty.

The plants are remarkably common (I took the photo above at the side of the road in the Risaralda department of Colombia) which probably accounts for their common use although they are not well known outside of Latin America. In fact, the only scientific review article on the psychology and neuroscience of ‘burundanga’ intoxication is in Spanish.

Work in published in English tends to focus on lab-based experiments using scopoloamine as a model of amnesia, plus the occasional sensationalist story in the press about ‘zombie drugs’.

However, the local name for the plant is ‘el borrachero’ – literally, the drunkeness.

Link to Wikipedia page on brugmansia.