The Limits of Dream: A Scientific Exploration of the Mind / Brain Interface

Front Cover
Elsevier, Jul 28, 2010 - Medical - 250 pages
The Limits of Dream focuses on what we currently know of the human central nervous system (CNS), examining the basic sciences of neurochemisty, neuroanatomy, and CNS electrophysiology as these sciences apply to dream, then reaching beyond basic science to examine the cognitive science of dreaming including the processes of memory, the perceptual interface, and visual imagery. Building on what is known of intrapersonal CNS processing, the book steps outside the physical body to explore artificially created dreams and their use in filmmaking, art and story, as well as the role of dreaming in creative process and creative “madness. The limits of our scientific knowledge of dream frame this window that can be used to explore the border between body and mind. What is known scientifically of the cognitive process of dreaming will lead the neuroscientist, the student of cognitive science, and the general reader down different paths than expected into an exploration of the fuzzy and complex horizon between mind and brain.
  • The clearest presentation of research and philosophy currently available relating to the mind/brain interface
  • Discusses the cognitive processes of dreaming utilized in film and artificial intelligence
  • Describes the functioning of dream in the creative process

From inside the book

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
1
SECTION 1 Definitions and the Search for Truth
11
SECTION 2 The Biological Substrate of Dream
27
SECTION 3 Studying the Cognitive Substrate of Dreaming
65
SECTION 4 The Cognitive Process of Dreaming
89
SECTION 5 The Cognitive Organization of Dreaming
115
SECTION 6 Functional uses for Dreaming
139
SECTION 7 Models of Mind and Brain
169
References
203
Index
229
Copyright

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Page 91 - I'll leave you till night; you are welcome to Elsinore. Ros. Good my lord ! [Exeunt Rosencrantz and Giiildenstern. Ham. Ay, so, God be wi' ye :—Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and 'peasant slave am I ! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd ; Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit...
Page 117 - Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand ? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight ? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain ? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.
Page 141 - Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O'er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past The eyes, which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast.
Page 13 - Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads.
Page 98 - If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream,' he wrote, 'and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Ay, and what then?
Page 171 - Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant...
Page 59 - Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakishlooking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked...
Page 123 - The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau- like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone.

About the author (2010)

JF Pagel has authored more than 170 publications. His basic research addressed the electrophysiology of consciousness, the neurochemistry of sleep and dream, and the role of REM sleep in learning and memory. His clinical work includes proofs for non-dreaming and the requirement of sleep for dream and nightmare, the diagnostic code for nightmare disorder, a definition protocol for dream, and demonstrations that REM sleep and dreaming are doubly dissociable. He has developed approaches to treating insomnia, sleep & altitude, narcolepsy, pediatric parasomnias, and waking somnolence, as well as addressing dream and nightmare use in trauma, art, creativity and filmmaking. He is co-editor of one of the major sleep-medicine texts: Primary Care Sleep Disorders (2007/ 2014). His books include: The Limits of Dream – A Scientific Exploration of the Mind /Brain Interface (2007), Dreaming and Nightmares (ed.) (2010), and Dream Science – Exploring the Forms of Consciousness (2014).