 Originally Posted by FryingMan
^^ Mild (haha) disagreement. I believe partaking in PM exercises helps keep your brain's goal center working in an active, searching state. Yes, you do need to direct it to the goal of lucid dreaming, but I think in and of itself is an important ingredient.
We're probably not disagreeing I can see why you'd think like that: you're a great practitioner of PM exercises. Still, like I stated above, things aren't always that clear. I'll give you an example:
Those PM exercises LaBerge mentioned? They're all useful and to some point effective, but you're not always engaging primarily in PM memory when you do them. When you state "active, searching state", that's not PM: it's mostly vigilance. You'd think it's the same, but studies like this show that while one is more automatic and related to priming (which might explain why the more you practice MILD, the better you become at it) the other requires a more conscious effort, the so called "active, searching state" that you associated with PM.
At the same time, oversimplifications are dangerous, and while I'm probably one of the biggest advocates of Prospective Memory, I can't stress enough the importance of moderation when determining causal relations on lucid dreaming induction techniques: researchers have yet an hard enough time to point correlates of lucidity (that last study that StephL ended disappointing about about was a great example) much less less-researched areas like MILD, because we can't even pinpoint exactly what's being influenced by PM or not. In the case of LaBerges, there's a HUGE difference between PM exercises and MILD. This is not to say they're not correlated or even cross-wired, but like you've read above, training PM doesn't mean you're using PM. While we're at it, Prospective Memory should always be considered under the assumptions that is a cognitive process that derives from many other cognitive processes: stuff like planning, intention, action, or even juggling several tasks, they all interfere with PM and vice-versa, so you can never pinpoint PM as the main culprit on lucid dreaming inductions: saying PM is an important task by itself is certainly correct, and while a bit stretched (goal is such an umbrella term), it also indeed helps your "brain goal center", but by doing that you have to say that you're entire brain is essential to lucid dreaming, because goal setting is merely a component of lucidity: would you say Sageous goes to bed with the intention of lucid dreaming? I'd argue that PM is virtually much less useful once certain entry-level barriers in lucid dreaming inductions are surpassed and as the frequency increases.
In fact, I think PM will eventually become another umbrella term: yes it's useful, yes a huge percentage of our everday-memories are probably prospective memories, and yes, PM is used on every single lucid dreaming task. But it shadows other just as important concepts: PM exercises will never be as useful as an approach of self-awareness, because with this later one, your scope grows so much farther than using a list of items that you prime yourself into detecting automatically. If you notice, self-awareness also requires PM, so in essence, it's just like the oversimplified concept of techniques for lucid dreaming (since most people are using all the techniques at the same time, even without realizing). Yes PM might be "an efficient portion of the process" granting it more attention than the other components, but the deal is....we still don't know that for sure ^^
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