DrmDoc

Greetings, Following up on my last comments, I said that nightmares and dreams in general are responses in sleep to the neural resonance our thalamus emits during sleep. What most of us don’t realize is that all dreams are essentially nightmares because they are all responses to the metabolic imbalance arising from the neural affects radiating from our brain’s core (thalamus) in sleep. Specifically, dream experiences are an effect of the lingering and continuous impact life experience has on our thalamic function; thereby, our psyche. It’s analogous to meteorites and craters—our experiences are meteorites and dreams are indicative of the mental, emotional, and social craters they cause. Much like those rocky projectiles from space, life experience can impact our psyche significantly and insignificantly. Relative to brain function, nightmares particularly suggest the larger, more significant impact of those experiences on thalamic function. Make no mistake, all dreams are meaningful in that they comprise the wave of neural responses our brain generates to suppress the linger impact that our actual life experience has had on the core of our brain function in sleep. Rather than describe or interpret our actual experience, dream content describes and interprets the impact of those experiences—they describe and interpret craters rather than meteorites. I welcome your thoughts.

Greetings, In my last post, I said that nightmares and dreams generally “reflect” something our brain believes it has experienced during sleep. I chose that wording specifically because it speaks to the basic nature of the processes in brain function producing those sleep experiences. Understanding the precise nature of the processes of brain function has been at times a nightmarish pursuit for me because it required me to accept some basic truths about those processes and, ultimately, about myself. I would not recommend pursuit of this topic for those who are not prepared to accept some basic and empirical truths about themselves. One basic truth of brain function is that its primary imperative is homeostasis, which is essentially our brain’s effort to maintain its metabolic stability. Understanding how homeostasis drives brain function will eventually require acceptance of how its functional instability drives our behavior and ultimately belies the concept of mental stability. Homeostasis in the brain is basically about maintaining a continuous and stable flow of the nutrients its cellular matrix requires. In my view, how our brain maintains that flow involves the neural equivalent of a convection process set in motion by the continuous sensory experiences affecting our brain’s core—the thalamus. Other than olfactory, the thalamus is where all neural pathways ultimately traverse in and out of the brain. From my perspective, our brain’s functional matrix basically comprises neural exchanges between just two primary constituents--the thalamus and everything other than the thalamus. The sensory stimulus our thalamus experiences via its incoming neural connections causes a continuous wave of neural resonance from the thalamus into surrounding brain structures and those brain structures respond with waves counter to that resonance. Those waves are what produces the behaviors we engage in response to conscious experience. Nightmares and dreams in general are responses in sleep to the neural resonance of the thalamus.

In the early days, we were oblivious to the effects of many harmful substances. Now, in present day, America has a president who wants to eliminate our protection from similarly harmful substances in the air we breathe and return us to our early days of oblivion...shameful!

Greetings, Relative to brain function, nightmares are like any other unremarkable dream experiences in that they are basically a byproduct of the glymphatic processes occurring in the brain during sleep. Those processes decrease the toxic brain chemistry that impede and suppresses our brain's wakeful activity such as the removal of beta-amyloids and tau, which are waste byproducts of our brain's metabolic activity. As that toxicity diminishes, our sleeping brain becomes increasingly sensitive to stimuli. But even as byproducts of basic brain processes during sleep, nightmares and regular dreams aren’t any less meaningful in that they reflect something our brain believes it has experienced during sleep. Rather than random neural firings as some scientists propose, dreams are meaningful, which is even more so suggested by nightmares and their alarming content: I awoke to the presence of relatives--my deceased mother and stepfather--in my bedroom. But what was most alarming to me was the presence lying next to me, in my bed, beneath my bedsheets. Pealing those sheets back slowly revealed a sleeping man underneath with an unnervingly large and elongated head. I shouted, “Who is this?!” and woke immediately. That nightmare occurred a few week back and was the result of revisiting nonsensical theories about the nature of mind and consciousness espoused by Edgar Cayce who, in his day, was popularly refered to as The Sleeping Prophet.

Greetings! Imagine that…DrmDoc had a nightmare? Yes, indeed I did: I dreamed about leaving a classroom to visit a nearby store to satisfy an urge for something sweet. Arriving at the store, its layout was Cracker Barrel-est. There was clothing for sale up front, snack items behind a display case further in and, oddly, a deli/butcher counter. Looking around, I was a bit put off by several unruly children running around without parental supervision. As I turned to leave, some of them took notice of my displeasure and followed me out. I took that as an opportunity to impart some wisdom to one of my followers on the value of edification rather than disruption…but he had another interest. Approaching a street crossing, I felt the poke of what seemed like a gun barrel at my back and it was then that I realized my rowdy follower’s intent was to rob me. I wasn’t alarmed as I knew I could easily disarm him. If this dream doesn’t seem very nightmarish, that’s because it wasn’t a nightmare. It was an otherwise unremarkable dream experience I had subsequent to a recent nightmare I thought about sharing and discussing in this science forum. Interestingly—at the very least to me--this unremarkable dream explains both my motivation and hesitation for wanting to discuss nightmares here. My discussions regard the science of brain function and, unfortunately, psychology now holds very little interest to me without a clear and reliable basis in that function.

Although not today, I recently learned a very surprising bit of trivia...human are the only animals that have that protruding bit of bone and flesh we call a chin--and there's no agreement in science on why that is. Furtherstill, niether our primates cousins nor our hominds ancestors have or have had chins.

Please pardon this delayed response to your inquiry. Other than instinctive responses, which are primarily unconscious responses, some unconscious responses are a result of experience. From my perspective, our behavioral responses to stimuli issue from the thalamus in response the neural feedback (efference) the thalamus receives from surrounding cortical and subcortical structures in response to the stimuli (afference) the thalamus experiences. There are no cortical or subcortical efferent neural pathways that bypass the thalamus to our musculature; therefore, directives from our brain's neural hierarchy must pass through the thalamus to manifest as behavioral responses. In my opinion, conscious awareness generally occurs in the instance the thalamus receives neural feedback from the function of surrounding brain structures in response to the stimuli the thalamus receives from its sensory array. Learned responses isn't as much about focus as it is about continual stimulation of the afferent and efferent neural pathways associated with our behaviors. Learning is memory and memory, in my view, isn't the neural accumulation and storing of information, memory is the neural pathways that remain continuously stimulated by our experiences.

I believe you're asking about the nature of unconscious behaviors, which are the behaviors or reactions we appear to engage seemingly without conscious awareness. All behaviors we engage--including those defensive behaviors and reactions we engage without apparent conscious direction--are outputs of brain function. Our senses merely deliver information about ourselves and environment into brain function and it's that function that formulates and produces our responses. To some extent, all behaviors are learned, which for me infers that the neural pathways for our responses must be built and maintain by continual experience. Your continual experiences may have involved notable measures of threats where assessing and responding to potential physical harm have become second nature--it's akin to learning how to unconsciously maintain one's balance while riding a bike. For you, it's unconsciously maintaining your physical safety amid relaxed social settings.

Agreed and this isn't the forum for that discussion.

I agree and I now believe that perspective was @TheVat intent in adding that link to this discussion. The article does indeed explore a perspective on the incredible nauture of brain plasticity, but for me it further emphasizes my perspective on the subordinate nature of cortical structure relative to thalamic function..

The ideas expressed here were not clear from your previous comments regarding your link to Mr. Gazzaniga's article, but I would suspect moderators would not want us to digress in to speculations about other neural systems beyond the focus of this thread's discussion, which is the thalamus. There is, however, substantial research regarding the reticular activating system's contribution to conscious brain function by none regards that system the way they do thalamic function in the collection and relaying of the sensory information that our cognitive sense and expression of self--relative to our sensory environment--relies on. Forgive my misquote; however, in the opening paragraph to Mr. Gazzaniga's article he mentioned the case of a "white-collar worker" with a link to "without a brain". Mr. Gazzaniga goes on to discribe the worker as a "normal 44-year-old" with an "acceptable IQ" and a "gaping fluid-filled cavity where a brain would normally be." Selecting Mr. Gazzaniga's "without a brain" link led me to a Lancet article discussing the case of a man who suffered from postnatal hydrocephalus--and this was not the only reference to hydrocephalus cases in the focus of Mr. Gazzaniga's article. In fact, Mr. Gazzaniga also referenced the case of a 60 year-old male with a "head full of fluid and only a thin sheet of cortex" and the case of a 72 year-old living "largely without what we might recognize as 'a brain.'" The links to both these cases reference individuals with various types of hydrocephalus. I have to wonder if you read any of this article as Mr. Gazzaniga most certainly do reference cases arising from hydrocephalus. My apologies if my comments inferrred this as your first, but I share a similar sentiment when it comes to the depiction of hydrocephalus conditions as being "without a brain".

I believe your article references a condition known as hydrocephalus; wherein, cerebrospinal fluid fills the ventricles of the brain and compresses brain tissue into thin layers. It's disengenuous for the article's author to describe such individuals as having "no brain" because, in fact, these individuals do possess brain structures and tissue that can function as well as a normal brain when adapted sufficiently early in gestation or infancy. Therefore, cortical tissue is indeed required in these case and those of individuals with this condition who appear to lead normal, well adapted lives. For a clearer perspective of how behavior is affected by the absence or destruction of brain structure, you may want to look into decorticate and decerebrate brain studies involving both humans and animals.The effects of decortication and decerebration can be profound but survivable depending on whether there is brainstem damage and the stage of brain development when decortication/decerebration occurs. However, neither decortication, decerebration, nor hydrocephalus deminishes what this discussion thred topic suggests about what the thalamus does for brain function. From our sensory array, to our thalamus and cortex, there is indeed a holistic nature to what our central nervous system does to produce human conscousness but that doesn't render consciousness as a unique quality or exclusive to humans--which is what science rather than philosophy most clearly evinces, IMO.

Apologies, but I have very little interest in philosophy. However, if my philosophical baggage is weighted by methodologies that objectively and consistently provide and support evidence that either proves or disproves a hypothesis, then indeed I lean quite heavily on and will, unfortunately, continue to do so.

I agree; philosophy is philosophy and science is science.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/more-than-a-simple-relay-station-thalamus-may-guide-timing-of-brain-development-and-plasticity/ar-AA1KfkSf?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=9c3891007f444aea94c6a49cfb2b23b0&ei=11 Yet more support for the central role of the thalamus in cognitive outcomes. From the article: "Our data indicate that the thalamus likely plays a more active role in determining when cortical regions are plastic, and therefore when they exhibit both adaptability and vulnerability to our environments." Interestingly, Sydnor and her colleagues observed that the maturation of structural connections between the human thalamus and cortex followed a sensorimotor-to-association sequence. This suggests that the development of cortical regions in children and adolescents is aligned with changes in the strength of connections with the thalamus. Thus, the thalamus might serve as a "timekeeper" of cortical maturation. "This is important given that the pace of cortical maturation is linked to cognitive and psychological outcomes," The article suggests that the thalamus is indeed "more than a simple relay station." Again, more evidence that cortical development, thereby, cortical function is secondary to thalamic connections and function.