Thread: How does the brain create the unfamiliar?

Hey DV,

So I've been around for about a month, no lucids yet. Not a big deal, I like to speculate about them alot. Today I've started the wonder about the well known 'Anything is possible in a LD', and I don't understand how the brain is able to perform a certain action if you haven't experienced that action yet in waking life.
For example, I've never been to the north pole yet, let alone the moon. However, I have read DJ's about people visiting those places and I don't understand how their brain is able to create these places. I would understand if you could see the moon in a 2-Dimensional kind of view, we've all seen the pictures online or on TV, but how are their brains able to create a 3-Dimensional 'model' of those places?

Kind regards,
Silentium

I've never been to the playboy mansion before, but my brain imagined it somehow... I guess it uses everything it knows about the destination and does its best to recreate it. I would assume that the better your ability to imagine and visualize the better quality of the destination.

When we say anything is possible in a dream, we are not referring to actual real life experiences. Our world view is entirely subjective and when placed in the dream world any actions we take are mere representations of what we believe the action to be like.
It may seem like we can know things that we have not yet experienced, but it's just an illusion created the by our brains excellent ability to predict.

Our brains form models of everything we experience, these patterns are called schema. All the schema you have put together make your worldview. Utilizing these mental models our brain can predict what something may be experienced like based on it's similarity to an existing schema.

How would we know what it feels like to be on the moon.
Interestingly most people have felt weightlessness many times throughout their life. The clearest case is when you are at the apex of a jump. Almost all humans have felt sudden turn of acceleration. Add onto this the fact that most people have seen footage of others in space, our brains actually have quite a lot of experience to draw from.
As for the landscape itself, we have all come in contact with barren landscape at some point in our life, and most of us understand the colour and general shape of the moons surface.
Our brain then proceeds to build the dream scene based on the information it has. Things like the rock texture, the feeling of the spacesuit, the actual mechanics behind motions are assumed entirely to fit to our schema.
How close these experiences are to the real thing is hard to say, and would likely improve based on the amount of exposure someone has to the related experience.

An interesting example on the other end of the spectrum shows this nicely.
Imagine if I told you to dream of a "Glorpitosociosaurus". You would undoubtedly think of something, but the word is actually made up and represents nothing. This shows that even when our brain is given nothing more than a single word, we can still predict what it might be.
In this same fashion a dream experience can be composed of any amount of predicted content. In this way our brain can literally do "anything" from our own perspective.

The process by which our brain forms mental models, how they are linked and utilized largely remains a mystery though researchers are getting closer every day. As you can imagine it's extremely complex.

Your mind is really good at improvising when it needs to through the use of schemas that help us categorize and model the world. Say we see a chair that looks completely different from any chairs we've previously seen (something like this) your mind takes in the visual information and compares it with anything in the "database" and eventually comes to a conclusion that it is for the purpose of sitting on and labels it as chair, all in a split second time.

When dreaming, your mind is pulling stuff from that database and using it to make a virtual world that can feel completely real to us at the time. Pictures and videos of places we've never been before can show up in our dreams, we see pictures of Antarctica and our brain uses that to work up an environment in our dream that can seem very much like what it would in real life. It's easy to visualize the vast empty landscape, little vegetation, maybe some rocks and such. Most of us have seen snow so we can tell what that should look like, and most of us know what it feels like to be cold so we add that to the equation and thus can feel it in the dream. It may not be perfect but your brain is good at making stuff up and rolling with it during the dream. Even if the scene is completely wrong our brain rationalizes it so it makes sense to us until we wake up and realize that it wasn't perfect.

Thanks guys, very interesting!
Maybe we could even experiment with it a bit.
Could we take an object that we have never seen before or even heard of? For example, a famous cookie where I come from: the 'stroopwafel.' (it is also popular in France under a different name). Assuming you've never heard of this cookie before, here's a picture:
Gaufre_biscuit.jpg
We would study this picture for about a minute and then, when we have our next LD, we could try to 'summon' it, and study the 'dream-stroopwafel' After the dream ends, compare the picture with the cookie you saw in your dream..

Maybe someone who has a lot of LD's wouldn't mind wasting a bit of time studying a cookie

*Edit*

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

An interesting example on the other end of the spectrum shows this nicely.
Imagine if I told you to dream of a "Glorpitosociosaurus". You would undoubtedly think of something, but the word is actually made up and represents nothing. This shows that even when our brain is given nothing more than a single word, we can still predict what it might be.

Hmm.. If you are right about this, which you probably are since I imagined a dinosaur, I could have 'ruined' the experiment when I told you the cookie was called a stroopwafel Very interesting though!

Originally Posted by Silentium

Thanks guys, very interesting!
Maybe we could even experiment with it a bit.
Could we take an object that we have never seen before or even heard of? For example, a famous cookie where I come from: the 'stroopwafel.' (it is also popular in France under a different name). Assuming you've never heard of this cookie before, here's a picture:
Gaufre_biscuit.jpg
We would study this picture for about a minute and then, when we have our next LD, we could try to 'summon' it, and study the 'dream-stroopwafel' After the dream ends, compare the picture with the cookie you saw in your dream..

Maybe someone who has a lot of LD's wouldn't mind wasting a bit of time studying a cookie

*Edit*

Hmm.. If you are right about this, which you probably are since I imagined a dinosaur, I could have 'ruined' the experiment when I told you the cookie was called a stroopwafel Very interesting though!

I'll take you up on your offer, lol. I'm only a beginner but ever since I started LD they've become frequent so next time I do I'll imagine a plate of delicious stroopwafels for breakfast and eat them

I was thinking about the same exact thing (your thread topic, that is) when I woke up from an LD last night, I found myself in space just floating around, chilling and whatnot ha ha. But how would I know how it felt in space, what to expect to see from the perspective of being up there myself? I'll post my results soon, hopefully.

Unfortunately yes I know exactly what a stroopwafel is. I also know how delicious they are

As long as participants have no other information it would be interesting to see what they come up with, the experiment is fine if all people know is that its a cookie called stroopwafel.