One question for Péter Simor, a psychologist at Eötvös Loránd University.
BY BRIAN GALLAGHER
What makes us lucid dream?
Lucid dreaming is quite peculiar. We become aware that we are dreaming. In normal dreaming, we lack this reflective capacity. Lucid dreamers report that these experiences are extremely vivid, fantastic, and perceptually immersive, like virtual reality. In our new paper, we wanted to explain these differences in a model using the predictive coding framework. The main idea is that the brain is a prediction-generating machine.
Say I see someone in a dream. She’s probably my sister. No, she’s my girlfriend. No, she’s my mother. My brain is trying to make the best guesses of these images. And there is no constraint, no bottom-up input coming from the external world to fit or to shape these predictions. So the brain is just jumping from one prediction to the other. What we argue is that, in lucid dreaming, this is different. I see someone that speaks, let’s say, in a language that is different from the language that I know she usually speaks. This creates a prediction error. And I’m not changing the identity of the person. 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. We call this a superordinate self model: “I am dreaming. I’m lying in bed. 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.
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. Skilled lucid dreamers can maintain this state, manipulate and monitor their attention. That’s why there’s an important concept called precision weighting, an important part of the theory of predictive coding. Precision weighting reflects the precision I assign to some kind of prediction error. Precision weighting is usually quite low when we are dreaming. We don’t really care if a house is really house-like. Its shapes are sometimes strange. We don’t really have these fine-grain details of the environment because precision is extremely low. In lucid dreaming, it becomes higher. Everything that we experience, let’s say visually, is relevant. We assign strong precision to this information. That’s why we really see the world as if it were quite real.
Inside the ‘Hilton Space Station’ with luxury suites, amazing views, and cookies
Starlab, the replacement for the International Space Station, will have astronaut suites designed by Hilton Hotels – they’ll work on communal spaces, sleeping arrangements, and much more
Hilton is set to design crew quarters for the Voyager Starlab space station (Stock image) (Image: Voyager/Hilton)
If you thought a regular Hilton hotel was expensive, think again.
The luxury hotel chain has announced it will be designing the rooms, suites and lounge areas of Starlab, the upcoming replacement for the International Space Station.
Hilton will help design the interior of the private space station, which is due to be launched into low-Earth orbit by 2027.
At this point, the jokes about ska are about as tired as the jokes about fedoras — which are maybe one of the more deserved of the many digs at ska. It’s got horns. It’s corny. It’s silly. It’s “what plays in a 13-year-old kid’s head when he gets extra mozzarella sticks,” as the internet would tell you.
They’re easy jokes to make, and there are bands that venture into silly territory with costumes and lighthearted songs, but for every Aquabats, there’s a Less Than Jake singing about feelings of failure and anxiety or Reel Big Fish writing songs about feeling like they’re never enough.
For so many, ska is the sound of revolution. Bands like the Specials and Madness have been using the genre to talk about topics like race and class issues. As the genre evolves, that “sound of revolution” echoes the societal changes and cultural shifts. Right now, ska bands are creating another “revival” and re-analysis of the genre by discussing things like mental health, gender, and LGBTQIA+ representation.
“Releasing songs in a style you enjoy, around the internal dialogue that’s haunting you at the time, doesn’t deserve to be boiled down to ‘what you hear in your head when you get extra mozzarella sticks,’” Flying Raccoon Suit vocalist Jessica Jeansonne says. “I wish people would not discount someone’s art just because there’s a little bit of trumpet in it. There’s a whole underlying message of somebody suffering, but somebody hears a trumpet and it’s ‘There’s that cheese.’”
Billionaire Art Collectors Circle as Megabucks Masterpieces Head for Auction
TROPHY HUNTING – The mega-auction season begins with an expected big-money bloodbath at the sale of Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s collection. Who will buy what remains an intriguing mystery.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Christie’s
It’s said that the pillars of the art market come down to the three Ds: death, divorce, or debt. It’s in these dramatic instances of transition, financial peril or both that longtime collectors are most motivated to unload their goods, and when they do, the results can be spectacular.
In May, Sotheby’s scored a huge win with the Macklowe collection auction, a sale made possible by real estate developer Harry Macklowe’s splashy split from his wife, Linda. The Macklowes, who had no pre-nuptial agreement, had been married for nearly 60 years and their divorce was bitter: Linda’s legal team claimed her ex, who’d also been shelling out for his French mistress’s Park Avenue apartment, hadn’t paid taxes since the ’80s.
On the strength of the sale of only 65 lots, including a $61 million Pollock and $48 million Rothko, the Macklowe collection became the most expensive ever to sell at auction: altogether, Sotheby’s did $922.2 million in sales. “This sale will… make history as one of the defining moments in the art market,” Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart said at the time.
The Macklowe divorce also produced some hilariously messy rich person behavior. Years prior to the sale, Harry Macklowe paid for 42-foot-high Times Square billboards of his and mistress-turned-wife Patricia Landeau’s faces. If that doesn’t send a message, I don’t know what does.
Art Laboe gets ready for his call-in dedication radio show in the KDAY studios in Palm Springs in 2015 (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
When Art Laboe was a child, his mother couldn’t pull him away from the radio.
“I listened to soap operas. I listened to news. I listened to all the announcements,” he told The Times in 2009. “I was enthralled with this box that talked.”
The disc jockey, who got his first radio job at 17, went on to fill Southern California’s airwaves for more than 70 years. He was one of the first to play rock ’n’ roll on the West Coast and was a pioneer in creating a compilation album, calling it “Oldies but Goodies.”
His inviting, baritone voice became a beacon for generations of fans, particularly Latinos.
Behind a microphone until late in life, Laboe died late Friday while battling pneumonia, Joanna Morones, a spokesperson for Laboe’s production company, said. He was 97.
Nikki Finke, the veteran entertainment journalist who founded Deadline in 2006 and helped grow it into a major player among Hollywood trades, died Sunday morning in Boca Raton, FL after a prolonged illness. She was 68.
The famously reclusive Finke founded her site as Deadline Hollywood Daily, the 24/7 Internet version of her long-running print column “Deadline Hollywood” for LA Weekly. She posted firsthand accounts of how she saw the entertainment business and was unfazed about dressing down its biggest players. Her often biting, acerbic posts called out wrongdoing and wrongdoers as she saw fit — making her a hero to many assistants and below-the-liners while irking many in the C-suites who were not used to anything less than praise.
Chess ‘cheat’ goes through full body scan at US Championships – including his BUM
by Isaac Crowson
The teen chess champ faces claims he cheated more than 100 chess matches
A TEEN chess champ accused of cheating got a full body scan — including his bum — before his latest tournament.
A security guard checked out Hans Niemann and raised a laugh when he got to his rear.
Niemann, 19, faces claims he cheated in more than 100 chess matches. He was notably accused of using a vibrating sex toy in his backside to pick up messages from his coach.
After he won his first round US Championships match, he was asked about the “elephant in the room” — a reference to the cheating scandal that has gripped the chess world.
Lenny Lipton, who wrote the poem that became the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “Puff the Magic Dragon” and developed technology used for today’s digital 3D theatrical projection systems, has died. He was 82.
Lipton died Wednesday of brain cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his son Noah told The Hollywood Reporter.
While studying engineering as a freshman at Cornell University, Lipton, inspired by a 1936 Ogden Nash poem, “The Tale of Custard the Dragon,” wrote a poem in 1959 on a typewriter owned by another physics major at the school, Peter Yarrow.
In this 2005 file photo, KGO radio personality Ronn Owens takes a five-minute break during the three-hour show on Oct. 24, 2005, in San Francisco. Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
American broadcasting company Cumulus Media abruptly announced Thursday during a morning talk show that it’s ending the KGO (810 AM) news-talk format as listeners know it, and company officials told SFGATE in an email that it will be revealing a new brand on the channel on Monday.
“The Mark Thompson Show,” which aired Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to noon, was interrupted just after 10 a.m. with a pretaped announcement about the format change.
KGO talk show host Mark Thompson said he was told just before going on air that the format was changing and his show was being canceled along with all the other regular programming.
Can This Very Private, Very Rich American Save Reggae?
UNLIKELY AMBASSADOR – Joe Bogdanovich doesn’t like to talk about his fortune. He doesn’t even like to say how old he is. Instead he lets his passion projects promoting reggae talk for him.
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty
Jamaican reggae music has an unlikely yet passionate ambassador—a white American businessman of a certain age who is investing big energy and even bigger money to spread the gospel of reggae and lure tourists to its source. His name is Joe Bogdanovich. This California native could have invested his fortune anywhere in the world, but he chose the island nation of Jamaica. He doesn’t like to talk about where his money originally came from, but it is well known that he is the grandson and heir of the late Martin J. Bogdanovich, the founder of StarKist Tuna.
“There’s a lot of poverty here,” Bogdanovich says of the Caribbean island with just 3 million inhabitants, roughly the population of Brooklyn. “But there’s also a lot of talent. Talent means there are a lot of opportunities. It’s a small enough country that you can make a difference. I really believe that, and some people say I already have.”
Bogdanovich’s investment in Jamaican entertainment remains unmatched and has silenced suspicions that he’s yet another white man trying to exploit the native culture for his own gain.
Just recently his reggae festival Sumfest 2022 pumped $20 million into the Jamaican economy. It was the culmination of Bogdanovich’s involvement in Jamaica that dates to 1999, when he moved his Los Angeles company DownSound Records to Kingston and began developing local talent that eventually crossed borders, including Nuff Nuff, Ninjaman, Elephant Man and Nanko. In a tale straight out of the hit movie The Harder They Come, Nanko had come from the countryside to Kingston and worked as a squeegee man until his musical talent was discovered. Bogdanovich even made his business tactics and problems public by putting himself in a humorous music video pitting Ninjaman against the upstart Specialist Dweet.
The movies hail from a diverse group of writers—Kirkland Morris (BMF; Power Book IV: Force), Justin Calen-Chenn (Bel-Air, Limited Edition), Dallas Jackson (Blumhouse’s Thriller; The System), and Kevin Grevioux (King of Killers; Underworld)—whose stories focus on increasing BIPOC representation.
Alongside Jackson for G-Unit Film & TV and Roth, producers will also include Regi Cash, Brian Newton, and Caroline Ohlson for 3BlackDot, Roger Birnbaum and Michael Besman will also produce for Electromagnetic Productions, as well as James Frey and Mitchell Lawrence Smith. Jack Davis will produce Creature House for Crypt TV.
