Jan 15, 2021 08:23 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 15, 2021 08:26 PM by C C.)
Research Finds There's More Than One Type of Curiosity. Which Do You Have?
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-mor...o-you-have
EXCERPTS: Curiosity affects everything from our relationships to our education, but it's not easy to pin down and put under a microscope to study. With the help of Wikipedia though, researchers have now done just, exploring two main types of curiosity. [...] The resulting study was able to split the individuals into two previously identified types, as far as curiosity goes: the 'busybody' who explores a lot of diverse information, and the 'hunter' who stays on a more focused track when it comes to gaining knowledge. ... These findings can be useful in a number of ways, including in informing approaches to teaching – particularly in how knowledge and resources can be best presented, and how different problem-solving styles can be supported... (MORE - details)
Dreaming is like taking LSD: Causing brain preference for weak relationships
https://nautil.us/issue/95/escape/dreami...taking-lsd
EXCERPTS: . . . By testing participants as soon as they woke up, he was able to ensure that their brains’ neuromodulator levels were still close to where they had been before waking up. He tested them right after waking them from REM sleep in the middle of the night, and the results were better than he could have hoped for. Priming produced by strongly related words dropped by 90 percent, while that produced by weak primes increased more than twofold. When participants were awakened from REM sleep—and presumably while they were in REM sleep just a few minutes earlier—their brains were activating weakly related words eight times more effectively than strongly related words.
When our brains dream, this preference for weak associations helps explain why so many of our dreams lack any transparent connection to the dominant thoughts, feelings, and events of our day. Even when connections are obvious, the usefulness of a dream usually isn’t. But this is exactly what NEXTUP predicts—weakly associated networks are being explored to understand possibilities.
The brain is searching more widely than during wakefulness, going through less obvious associations, and digging for hidden treasures in places it would never consider while awake. In the glare of the day—when our brains are dealing primarily with new incoming sensations and the balance of neurotransmitters in our brain is optimized for processing the here and now—the usefulness, or “rightness,” of these newly found associations might be incomprehensible. But that’s fine. We don’t need to understand why our brain chose these associations. We don’t need to know whether the associations used to construct a given dream were useful. We don’t even need to remember the dream. All the important work was done while we slept. Associations were discovered, explored, and evaluated while we dreamed, and if our brain calculated that some of them were indeed novel, creative, and potentially useful to us, then it strengthened them and filed them away for later use.
[...] It’s a little like the ’60s, when people were dropping acid and having profound “acid insights” along the lines of, “When you flush the toilet, everything goes down!” They would tell you this, wide-eyed in awe at their amazing insight, then get a bit sheepish and say, “It meant more than that; it really explained everything.”
The dreaming brain is searching more widely than during wakefulness, digging for hidden treasures. In fact, the feeling that dreams have meaning is not just a little like the ’60s. It’s likely identical. [...] All the weirdness of LSD—the hallucinations and acid insights and everything else—may be a direct consequence of ... biochemical blockade of serotonin release.
This obviously isn’t the normal state of affairs in the brain. But there is one time every day when serotonin release is completely blocked, and that’s during REM sleep. We dream in both REM and nonREM sleep, but the most bizarre, emotional, and unlikely dreams—and arguably those that seem most meaningful to us—occur in REM sleep. The reduction in serotonin levels during nonREM sleep (relative to wakefulness) and the complete cessation of its release during REM sleep may serve the important role of shifting the brain’s bias toward assigning more value than it otherwise would to those weak associations activated during dream construction. This chemical action may be the grease that enables these potentially useful new associations to slide into our repertoire of valuable insights.
[...] In recent years, thanks to brain imaging, scientists have discovered the brain’s preference for weak associations during wakefulness, specifically to dreaming’s cousins, daydreaming and mind-wandering. Scientists had long assumed that the activity pattern seen during quiet rest reflected the activity of a brain not doing anything. In retrospect, this was obviously a foolish assumption. Our brains are always thinking about something. The brain areas that turn off when we start to carry out a mental task are the regions that do whatever the brain does when we’re “not doing anything.” Together these regions make up the default mode network (DMN), whose discovery has helped us appreciate just how true it is that the brain never rests... (MORE - details)
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-mor...o-you-have
EXCERPTS: Curiosity affects everything from our relationships to our education, but it's not easy to pin down and put under a microscope to study. With the help of Wikipedia though, researchers have now done just, exploring two main types of curiosity. [...] The resulting study was able to split the individuals into two previously identified types, as far as curiosity goes: the 'busybody' who explores a lot of diverse information, and the 'hunter' who stays on a more focused track when it comes to gaining knowledge. ... These findings can be useful in a number of ways, including in informing approaches to teaching – particularly in how knowledge and resources can be best presented, and how different problem-solving styles can be supported... (MORE - details)
Dreaming is like taking LSD: Causing brain preference for weak relationships
https://nautil.us/issue/95/escape/dreami...taking-lsd
EXCERPTS: . . . By testing participants as soon as they woke up, he was able to ensure that their brains’ neuromodulator levels were still close to where they had been before waking up. He tested them right after waking them from REM sleep in the middle of the night, and the results were better than he could have hoped for. Priming produced by strongly related words dropped by 90 percent, while that produced by weak primes increased more than twofold. When participants were awakened from REM sleep—and presumably while they were in REM sleep just a few minutes earlier—their brains were activating weakly related words eight times more effectively than strongly related words.
When our brains dream, this preference for weak associations helps explain why so many of our dreams lack any transparent connection to the dominant thoughts, feelings, and events of our day. Even when connections are obvious, the usefulness of a dream usually isn’t. But this is exactly what NEXTUP predicts—weakly associated networks are being explored to understand possibilities.
The brain is searching more widely than during wakefulness, going through less obvious associations, and digging for hidden treasures in places it would never consider while awake. In the glare of the day—when our brains are dealing primarily with new incoming sensations and the balance of neurotransmitters in our brain is optimized for processing the here and now—the usefulness, or “rightness,” of these newly found associations might be incomprehensible. But that’s fine. We don’t need to understand why our brain chose these associations. We don’t need to know whether the associations used to construct a given dream were useful. We don’t even need to remember the dream. All the important work was done while we slept. Associations were discovered, explored, and evaluated while we dreamed, and if our brain calculated that some of them were indeed novel, creative, and potentially useful to us, then it strengthened them and filed them away for later use.
[...] It’s a little like the ’60s, when people were dropping acid and having profound “acid insights” along the lines of, “When you flush the toilet, everything goes down!” They would tell you this, wide-eyed in awe at their amazing insight, then get a bit sheepish and say, “It meant more than that; it really explained everything.”
The dreaming brain is searching more widely than during wakefulness, digging for hidden treasures. In fact, the feeling that dreams have meaning is not just a little like the ’60s. It’s likely identical. [...] All the weirdness of LSD—the hallucinations and acid insights and everything else—may be a direct consequence of ... biochemical blockade of serotonin release.
This obviously isn’t the normal state of affairs in the brain. But there is one time every day when serotonin release is completely blocked, and that’s during REM sleep. We dream in both REM and nonREM sleep, but the most bizarre, emotional, and unlikely dreams—and arguably those that seem most meaningful to us—occur in REM sleep. The reduction in serotonin levels during nonREM sleep (relative to wakefulness) and the complete cessation of its release during REM sleep may serve the important role of shifting the brain’s bias toward assigning more value than it otherwise would to those weak associations activated during dream construction. This chemical action may be the grease that enables these potentially useful new associations to slide into our repertoire of valuable insights.
[...] In recent years, thanks to brain imaging, scientists have discovered the brain’s preference for weak associations during wakefulness, specifically to dreaming’s cousins, daydreaming and mind-wandering. Scientists had long assumed that the activity pattern seen during quiet rest reflected the activity of a brain not doing anything. In retrospect, this was obviously a foolish assumption. Our brains are always thinking about something. The brain areas that turn off when we start to carry out a mental task are the regions that do whatever the brain does when we’re “not doing anything.” Together these regions make up the default mode network (DMN), whose discovery has helped us appreciate just how true it is that the brain never rests... (MORE - details)