Consciousness in waking and dreaming

Hypnodude · November 27, 2002, 10:32pm

Consciousness in waking and dreaming: The roles of neuronal oscillation and neuromodulation in determining similarities and differences
D. Kahn, E. F. Pace-Schott and J. A. Hobson
Neuroscience Vol. 78, No. 1, pp. 13–38, 1997

State-dependent aspects of consciousness are explored with particular attention to waking and dreaming. First, those phenomenological diVerences between waking and dreaming that have been established through subjective reports are reviewed. These diVerences are robustly expressed in most aspects of consciousness including perception, attention, memory, emotion, orientation, and thought. Next, the roles of high frequency neuronal oscillation and neuromodulation are explored in waking and rapid eye movement sleep, the stage of sleep with which the most intense dreaming is associated. The high frequency neuronal oscillations serve similar functions in the wake and rapid eye movement states sleep but neuromodulation is very diVerent in the two states. The collective high frequency oscillatory activity gives coherence to spatially separate neurons but, because of the diVerent neuromodulation, the binding of sensory input in the wake state is very diVerent from the binding of internally perceived input during rapid eye movement sleep.
An explanatory model is presented which states that neuromodulation, as well as input source and brain activation level diVerentiate states of the brain, while the self-organized collective neuronal oscillations unify consciousness via long range correlations.

FireHorse · January 28, 2003, 1:20am

This may explain why dream recall can be such a chore.