Download or read book Conscious Mind Sleeping Brain written by J. Gackenbach and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A conscious mind in a sleeping brain: the title of this book provides a vivid image of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which dreamers are consciously aware that they are dreaming while they seem to be soundly asleep. Lucid dreamers could be said to be awake to their inner worlds while they are asleep to the external world. Of the many questions that this singular phenomenon may raise, two are foremost: What is consciousness? And what is sleep? Although we cannot pro vide complete answers to either question here, we can at least explain the sense in which we are using the two terms. We say lucid dreamers are conscious because their subjective reports and behavior indicate that they are explicitly aware of the fact that they are asleep and dreaming; in other words, they are reflectively conscious of themselves. We say lucid dreamers are asleep primarily because they are not in sensory contact with the external world, and also because research shows physiological signs of what is conventionally considered REM sleep. The evidence presented in this book-preliminary as it is-still ought to make it clear that lucid dreaming is an experiential and physiological reality. Whether we should consider it a paradoxical form of sleep or a paradoxical form of waking or something else entirely, it seems too early to tell.
Download or read book The Science of Consciousness written by Trevor A. Harley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness concerns awareness and how we experience the world. How does awareness, a feature of the mental world, arise from the physical brain? Is a dog conscious, or a jellyfish, and what explains the difference? How is consciousness related to psychological processes such as perception and cognition? The Science of Consciousness covers the psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience of consciousness. Written for introductory courses in psychology and philosophy, this text examines consciousness with a special emphasis on current neuroscience research as well as comparisons of normal and damaged brains. The full range of normal and altered states of consciousness, including sleep and dreams, hypnotic and meditative states, anesthesia, and drug-induced states, as well as parapsychological phenomena and their importance for the science of consciousness is covered, as well as the 'higher' states and how we can attain them. Throughout the text attempts to relate consciousness to the brain.
Download or read book Dreaming Souls written by Owen Flanagan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-05-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise--"unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys"? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. And in Dreaming Souls he provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a compelling new theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects, "free riders," irrelevant from an evolutionary point of view. But dreams are hardly unimportant. Indeed, Flanagan argues that dreams are self-expressive, the result of our need to find or to create meaning, even when we're sleeping. Rejecting Freud's theory of manifest and latent content--of repressed wishes appearing in disguised form--Flanagan shows how brainstem activity during sleep generates a jumbled profusion of memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and desires, which the cerebral cortex then attempts to shape into a more or less coherent story. Such dream-narratives range from the relatively mundane worries of non REM sleep to the fantastic confabulations of deep REM that resemble psychotic episodes in their strangeness. But however bizarre these narratives may be, they can shed light on our mental life, our well being, and our sense of self. Written with clarity, lively wit, and remarkable insight, Dreaming Souls offers a fascinating new way of apprehending one of the oldest mysteries of mental life.
Download or read book Lucid Dreaming written by Celia Green and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucid dreams are dreams in which a person becomes aware that they are dreaming. They are different from ordinary dreams, not just because of the dreamer's awareness that they are dreaming, but because lucid dreams are often strikingly realistic and may be emotionally charged to the point of elation. Celia Green and Charles McCreery have written a unique introduction to lucid dreams that will appeal to the specialist and general reader alike. The authors explore the experience of lucid dreaming, relate it to other experiences such as out-of-the-body experiences (to which they see it as closely related) and apparitions, and look at how lucid dreams can be induced and controlled. They explore their use for therapeutic purposes such as counteracting nightmares. Their study is illustrated throughout with many case histories.
Download or read book States of Consciousness written by Dean Cvetkovic and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible overview of current knowledge, an expert team of editors and authors describe experimental approaches to consciousness. These approaches are shedding light on some of the hitherto unknown aspects of the distinct states of human consciousness, including the waking state, different states of sleep and dreaming, meditation and more. The book presents the latest research studies by the contributing authors, whose specialities span neuroscience, neurology, biomedical engineering, clinical psychology and psychophysiology, psychosocial medicine and anthropology. Overall this anthology provides the reader with a clear picture of how different states of consciousness can be defined, experimentally measured and analysed. A future byproduct of this knowledge may be anticipated in the development of systematic corrective treatments for many disorders and pathological problems of consciousness.
Download or read book Dream Consciousness What Happens to Consciousness During Sleep written by Jack Tanner and published by Magus Books. This book was released on with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You come to a fork in the road. On the right is the path to the world created by all minds. This is the objective world, the public world. On the left is the path to the world created by your own mind, your own unconscious. This is your dream world, your private world. Your dream world changes every time you go sleep. There is no continuity of space and time. The objective world, by contrast, stays the same every time you wake up. There is complete continuity of space and time. That's the difference between an objective, public experience and a subjective, private experience. Your consciousness is designed for facing the public world. It becomes drastically disoriented when it faces the private world. Yet it also has the chance to do something astounding – to enter and probe your own mind and discover all of its greatest and deepest secrets. How else will you know yourself if you don't know your own mind? Only dreams can take you there. It's time to delve into the mysteries and extraordinary powers of dreams.
Download or read book Waking Dreaming Being written by Evan Thompson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate—either in the waking state or in a lucid dream—we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives.
Download or read book The Head Trip written by Jeff Warren and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-03-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A world at once familiar and unimaginably strange exists all around us, and within us – it is the vast realm of consciousness. In The Head Trip, science journalist Jeff Warren explores twelve distinct, natural states of consciousness available to us in a twenty-four-hour day, each state offering its own kind of knowledge and insight – its own adventure. The hypnagogic state, when our minds hover between waking and sleeping, can be a rich source of creativity and even compassion. Then there’s the Watch, an almost magical waking experience in the middle of the night that has been all but lost to electric light and modern sleep patterns. Daydreaming and trance, lucid dreaming, the Zone, and the Pure Conscious Event – from sleep laboratory to remote northern cabin, neurofeedback clinic to Buddhist retreat, Warren visits them all. Along the way, he talks to neuroscientists, chronobiologists, anthropologists, monks, and many others who illuminate his stories with cutting-edge science and age-old wisdom. On this trip, all are welcome and no drugs are required: all you need to pack are a functioning cerebrum and an open mind. Replete with stylish graphics and brightened by comic panels conceived and drawn by the author, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant and original description of the shifting experience of consciousness that’s also a practical guide to enhancing creativity and mental health. This book does not just inform and entertain – it shows how every one of us can expand upon the ways we experience being alive.
Download or read book The Dreaming Mind written by Melanie G. Rosen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dreaming Mind provides an insightful, interdisciplinary approach to the study of dreaming, exploring its nature and examining some of the implications of dream states for theories of consciousness, cognition, and the self. Drawing on research from philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology, the book reveals new insights into the sleeping and waking mind. It considers philosophical thinking such as extended mind theory, theories of consciousness and theories of the self, applying these to empirical dream research. The book embraces a pluralistic account of dreaming, showing how dream experiences can be highly varied in content and cognition and discusses the implications of dreaming for a variety of influential consciousness theories, including higher-order thought theory, global workspace theory and the phenomenal/access distinction. Alongside imaginative and hallucinatory dreaming, the book also discusses vicarious dreaming and its implications for philosophy of the self. Offering an integrative approach into our understanding of dreams and the mind, this book is essential reading for students and researchers of consciousness, dreams, philosophy, and cognitive sciences, as well as anyone who is curious about dreaming.
Download or read book Lucid Waking The Answer to the Problem of Consciousness written by Jack Tanner and published by Magus Books. This book was released on with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no problem more baffling to the academic world than the problem of consciousness. It's fair to say that no academic has any clue at all about what consciousness is. In fact, academics have totally confused it with something radically different, namely sentience. The problem that faces the academic world is the insurmountable one of how you get lifeless, mindless, purposeless objects (material atoms) to manifest subjectivity. It's a category error to imagine that matter can provide any answers to the foundational issues of mind. Academics believe that to answer the problem of subjectivity is thereby to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness. In fact, the problem of subjectivity (sentience) is totally different from the problem of consciousness. To understand why, simply ponder all of the following statements: 1) animals are sentient but not conscious; 2) human babies are sentient but not conscious; 3) humans who never encountered another human are sentient but not conscious; 4) sleepwalking humans are sentient but not conscious. The problem of sentience is drastically different from the problem of consciousness and if you conflate the two you have immediately set yourself an impossible task, especially if you make any attempt to solve these problems within the framework of materialism (i.e., the ideology of anti-mind). To understand what consciousness actually is, it's essential to understand the difference, in the world of sleep, between dreaming and lucid dreaming. Exactly the same dichotomy is present in the waking world. A sleepwalker is a person who can do complex tasks – such as riding a motorbike for half an hour – without any consciousness. A conscious version of a sleepwalker engages in what we refer to as "lucid waking". Lucid waking is the key to consciousness. The fact is that consciousness is not an inherent property of human individuals. It's not built into them. It's acquired, just as some people acquire the ability to become lucid dreamers. Since sleepwalkers could do many of the same things as conscious individuals, the question is invited of why consciousness is required at all. If you don't know what consciousness is, how can you expand your consciousness to the maximum? Wouldn't you like to be maximally conscious? Think of the power you would have.
Download or read book Why We Sleep written by Matthew Walker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity ... An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now ... neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Mind at Night written by Andrea Rock and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologists and philosophers have long grappled with the mysteries of dreaming, and now-thanks largely to recent innovations in brain imaging -neuroscientists are starting to join the conversation. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning journalist Andrea Rock traces the brief but fascinating history of this emerging field. She then takes us into modern sleep labs across the country, asking the questions that intrigue us all: Why do we remember only a fraction of our dreams? Why are dreams usually accompanied by intense emotions? Can dreams truly spark creative thought or help solve problems? Are the universal dream interpretations of Freud and Jung valid? Accessible and engaging, The Mind at Night shines a bright light on our nocturnal journeys and tells us what the sleeping mind reveals about our waking hours.
Download or read book The Twenty four Hour Mind written by Rosalind D. Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Twenty-four Hour Mind, sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as 'parasomnias' to propose a new theory of how the human brain works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours, based upon research showing that one of the primary purposes of sleep is to aid in regulating emotions and processing experiences that occur during waking hours.
Download or read book The Conscious Brain written by Jesse Prinz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizing decades of research, this book advances a theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz argues that consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and that consciousness depends on attention.
Download or read book The Honeymoon Effect written by Bruce H. Lipton and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Biology of Belief Discover the secret to manifesting and maintaining the Honeymoon Effect—a state of bliss, passion, energy, and health in the early stages of a great love—throughout your entire life Think back on the most spectacular love affair of your life—the Big One that toppled you head over heels. For most, it was a time of heartfelt bliss, robust health, and abundant energy. Life was so beautiful that you couldn’t wait to bound out of bed in the morning to experience more Heaven on Earth. It was the Honeymoon Effect that was to last forever. Unfortunately for most, the Honeymoon Effect is frequently short lived. Imagine what your planetary experience would be like if you could maintain the Honeymoon Effect throughout your whole life. Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., best-selling author of The Biology of Belief, describes how the Honeymoon Effect was not a chance event or a coincidence, but a personal creation. This book reveals how we manifest the Honeymoon Effect and the reasons why we lose it. This knowledge empowers readers to create the honeymoon experience again, this time in a way that ensures a happily-ever-after relationship that even a Hollywood producer would love. With authority, eloquence, and an easy-to-read style, Lipton covers the influence of quantum physics (good vibrations), biochemistry (love potions), and psychology (the conscious and subconscious minds) in creating and sustaining juicy loving relationships. He also asserts that if we use the fifty trillion cells that live harmoniously in every healthy human body as a model, we can create not just honeymoon relationships for couples but also a “super organism” called humanity that can heal our planet.
Download or read book The Conscious Mind written by Zoltan Torey and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind—a new (“off-line”) internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's “awareness” became self-accessible and reflective—that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge—because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired “quality,” “cosmic principle,” “circuitry arrangement,” or “epiphenomenon,” as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.
Download or read book Lucid Dreaming written by Ryan Hurd and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating new collection, an all-star team of researchers explores lucid dreaming not only as consciousness during sleep but also as a powerful ability cultivated by artists, scientists, and shamans alike to achieve a variety of purposes and outcomes in the dream. The first set of its kind, Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives on Consciousness in Sleep provides a comprehensive showcase of the theories, research, and direct experience that serve to illuminate how certain people can maintain conscious awareness while dreaming. The text is organized into two sections, covering science, psychology, and education; and religious traditions, creativity, and culture. Contributors to this two-volume work include top dream experts across the globe—scholars sharing knowledge gained from deep personal explorations and cutting-edge scientific investigations. Topics covered include the neuroscience of lucid dreaming, clinical uses of lucid dreaming in treating trauma, the secret history of lucid dreaming in English philosophy, and spiritual practices of lucid dreaming in Islam, Buddhism, and shamanic traditions. The work also addresses lucid dreaming in movies including The Matrix and literature such as the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and explains how modern video gaming enhances lucidity. This set serves as an ideal text and reference work for school libraries and academic courses in anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and cognitive science as well as for graduate-level study in holistic education—an increasingly popular specialization.
