Thread: Information, material and sources accumulation (research dept.)

OH YEAH! Sorry!

All the information I'll be posting is from The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. I edited the title into my post. n_n

It'll be a while until I post from any other books. This one has so much info and the chapters are really long.

Originally Posted by Anonymoose

OH YEAH! Sorry!

All the information I'll be posting is from The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.

It'll be a while until I post from any other books. This one has so much info and the chapters are really long. xD

Awesome.

Here is the brain wave diagram for sleep onset. I decided to take a picture because I know I'll never have the time to go get it scanned. xD

Spoiler for Brain Waves of Sleep Onset:

Chapter 1
The Hypnagogic
CONTINUED

● REM sleep was discovered back in 1952 in a now famous series of findings by the "father" of sleep research, University of Chicago physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman, and his young graduate student Eugene Aserinsky.

● [...] there were other REM signatures, including total muscle paralysis and brain activity that looked almost identical in every way to waking activity, hence REM sleep's other name, "paradoxical sleep."

● The hypnagogic has a reputation for being a permeable transition state, where dreaming can reach across into waking and stir it up. Some artists claim it is a peerless state for creativity, that under the right circumstances brilliant ideas cascade down from remote hemispheric corners onto inspired canvases and manuscripts. Other claim it as a uniquely suggestive state for learning. They stock up on subliminal audiocassettes and Russian "hypnopedia" tutorials. The Internet is filled with sketchy-sounding techniques that promise to prolong and cultivate the hypnagogic state: "binaural beat" machines, trance-induction software, biofeedback "theta-training."

● Interest in the hypnagogic state goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who liked to "surprise the images which present[ed] themselves to him in sleep."

● In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes spoke of visions at sleep onset, a mysterious "kind of fancy." A century later, the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg recorded his hypnagogic explorations in a dream journal. He used the state as a departure point for intergalactic travel, his dream body zipping through the celestial spheres like a perfumed and bewigged prototype of the Silver Surfer.

● Serious scientific research on the hypnagogic began with nineteenth-century French psychologist Alfred Maury, who first coined the term. Throughout the twentieth century small groups of researchers continued to conduct studies, even during the deep chill of behaviorism, which put about as much faith in the subjective anecdote as your average parole officer.

● By far the most exhaustive account of hypnagogic research was published in 1987 in a book called [i]Hypnagogia[i], written by psychologist Andreas Mavromatis. The book is a frothy combination of rigorous scientific research, trippy illustrations, and high-end speculation.

● Mavromatis breaks it down into four distinct stages. The hypnagogic experiences in this progression are like first-person versions of the physiological changes that Tadao Hori and Tore Nielsen chart so scrupulously on the EEG.

Spoiler for Mavromatis's Four Stages of Hynagogia:

● I eventually figured out that the tricks to scrutinizing hypnagogia are to do it alone and to be hyper-mindful. San Francisco-based dream researcher and artist Fariba Bogzaran told me that people who meditate have an easier time of it because they have practices being both subject and observer at once. She says the important thing is not crashing: instead, go to sleep consciously, and really try to notice the process of falling asleep. The result: a poor man's psychedelic trip.

● Leaving Mavromatis's four well-delinated stages for a moment, there's another sensation that can happen at the edge of sleep. It has terrorized sleepers for centures, and, as luck would have it (that is, luck combined with the heightened self-consciousness that comes with sleeping under video surveillance), a version of the phenomenon happened to me on the second night of my stay in the sleep lab. At about six in the morning, I woke from a dramatic dream. Thought not prompted, I decided to tell Phil about it [...] But when I tried to move my lips no sound came out. I was frozen. At that moment I became aware of a presence directly behind my head. [...] And then a voice, very clearly, whispered in my ear: "Harry versus Mad Potter." [...] I had just experienced a textbook case of "sleep paralysis."

Stopping there for today.
Gotta get ready for a BIRTHDAY PARTY soon.

great work anonymoose!

I deserve a slap in the face for my unexplainable absence and laziness. I guess I'm just not used to working like this since school has ended. xD

Chapter I
The Hypnagogic
CONTINUED

● Sleep paralysis is one of a suite of sleep disorders known as the parasomnias, and an excellent example of how our brain mechanisms governing one state of consciousness can malfunction and intrude onto another. With sleep paralysis, the person wakes up out of REM sleep and tries to rise, but their brain stem is slower to make the transition and continues to inhibit muscle activity (muscle paralysis, aka "atonia," being one of the three REM traits). In addition, body paralysis is often paired with what are called "hypnagogic hallucinations" -- aural and visual elements from the dream world superimposed over top of the waking world.

● When this happens the other way around--when waking functions intrude on sleep--it is called an arousal disorder. The most well known of these is sleepwalking also known as somnambulism. Sleepwalking, in Harvard researcher Allan Hobson's words, is like the well-known Yellow Pages ad, except "it's your brain stem doing the walking." The sleeper is actually in deep slow-wave sleep. The cerebral cortex is thought to be more or less offline, yet somehow complex goal-directed behaviors get fired up and the sleeper is sent staggering around the house.

● "Sleep terrors"--familiar to many parents--is the term for another arousal disorder, in which young children (and some adults) sit bolt upright out of sleep and scream holy murder. Their eyes may be open but they're oblivious to the calming voices of their parents; in fact, these children are really in slow-wave sleep.

● Another variation--linked to the onset of Parkinson's disease--happens mostly in men over fifty. It's called "REM sleep behavior disorder," and it's similar to sleep-walking except the sleeper isn't in slow-wave but in REM sleep. Somehow muscle atonia is deactivated and sleepers get up to act out their often violent dreams--often on their spouses.

● Parasomnias are incredibly important in understanding consciousness because they show that, in the words of one group of researches, "wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive states, and that sleep is not necessarily a global brain phenomenon."

I was away from the computer a lot by the time I started typing this. But I'll post more tomorrow after I'm done buying books. I'll look for some on dreaming.

You'll wanna make a note that the HH during SP are not limited to audio and visual.

Ernest Hartmann: Papers

Ernest Hartman Papers

This website has some useful recent articles written by a dream researcher.

The British Psychoanalytical Society: The Interpretation of Dreams and the Neurosciences
http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/solms4.htm
Pretty dry stuff, but has a lot of good information on the science of sleep.