We hypothesize that, during lucid dreaming, we also receive a lot of information from our body. That’s why we really see the world as if it were quite real. We assign strong precision to this information. Everything that we experience, let’s say visually, is relevant. We don’t really have these fine-grain details of the environment because precision is extremely low. We don’t really care if a house is really house-like. Precision weighting is usually quite low when we are dreaming.
Precision weighting reflects the precision I assign to some kind of prediction error. That’s why there’s an important concept called precision weighting, an important part of the theory of predictive coding. Skilled lucid dreamers can maintain this state, manipulate and monitor their attention. Lucid dreamers many times observe that they have these extreme experiences, but they are not surprised because they know that they are in a dream. But I’m having a dream and I’m having these ideas.” This will create a top-down model to which everything that is strange and surprising will be easy to accommodate. We call this a superordinate self model: “I am dreaming. Instead, I realize, “Okay, something is not going on correctly here.” This is a momentum for lucid dreaming, this prediction error, that will trigger the insight that I’m in a dream. And I’m not changing the identity of the person. I see someone that speaks, let’s say, in a language that is different from the language that I know she usually speaks. What we argue is that, in lucid dreaming, this is different. So the brain is just jumping from one prediction to the other. And there is no constraint, no bottom-up input coming from the external world to fit or to shape these predictions. My brain is trying to make the best guesses of these images. The main idea is that the brain is a prediction-generating machine.
In our new paper, we wanted to explain these differences in a model using the predictive coding framework.
Lucid dreamers report that these experiences are extremely vivid, fantastic, and perceptually immersive, like virtual reality. In normal dreaming, we lack this reflective capacity. One question for Péter Simor, a psychologist who directs the Budapest Laboratory of Sleep & Cognition at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
0 kommentar(er)
