{"id":12303,"date":"2022-10-31T19:01:11","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T02:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=12303"},"modified":"2022-12-02T19:45:20","modified_gmt":"2022-12-03T02:45:20","slug":"our-prediction-generating-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2022\/10\/31\/our-prediction-generating-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Prediction-generating Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from Nautilus<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Makes Us Lucid Dream?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

One question for P\u00e9ter Simor, a psychologist at E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BY BRIAN GALLAGHER<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What makes us lucid dream?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Say I see someone in a dream. She\u2019s probably my sister. No, she\u2019s my girlfriend. No, she\u2019s 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\u2019s say, in a language that is different from the language that I know she usually speaks. This creates a prediction error. And I\u2019m not changing the identity of the person. Instead, I realize, \u201cOkay, something is not going on correctly here.\u201d This is a momentum for lucid dreaming, this prediction error, that will trigger the insight that I\u2019m in a dream. We call this a superordinate self model: \u201cI am dreaming. I\u2019m lying in bed. But I\u2019m having a dream and I\u2019m having these ideas.\u201d This will create a top-down model to which everything that is strange and surprising will be easy to accommodate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s why there\u2019s 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\u2019t really care if a house is really house-like. Its shapes are sometimes strange. We don\u2019t 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\u2019s say visually, is relevant. We assign strong precision to this information. That\u2019s why we really see the world as if it were quite real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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from Nautilus What Makes Us Lucid Dream? One question for P\u00e9ter Simor, a psychologist at E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}