The Dreaming Voice Box: Micro-Screams and Mini-Exultations

2021

Highlights d Dream reports given after people awaken are often fragmentary and distorted d Our methods allow for two-way communication with individuals during a lucid dream d For a proof-of-concept demonstration, we presented math problems and yes-no questions d Dreamers answered in real time with volitional eye movements or facial muscle signals

SSRN Electronic Journal

Highlights d Dream reports given after people awaken are often fragmentary and distorted d Our methods allow for two-way communication with individuals during a lucid dream d For a proof-of-concept demonstration, we presented math problems and yes-no questions d Dreamers answered in real time with volitional eye movements or facial muscle signals

It is documented that dreamed speech elicits corresponding phasic muscle potential in facial, laryngeal and chin muscles (MacNeilage, 1971; Shimizu, 1986), though discernable speech behavior is largely inhibited in REM sleep. Measurement of such musculature electrical activity is in the domain of electromyography (EMG). This paper is a summary of a research project, the goal of which is to decode and transcribe REM dream speech using EMG. Raw data files will be provided upon request.

Sleep, 2021

Study ObjectivesSleep talking (ST) has been rarely studied as an isolated phenomenon. Late investigations over the psycholinguistic features of vocal production in ST pointed to coherence with wake language formal features. Therefore, we investigated the EEG correlates of Verbal ST as the overt manifestation of sleep-related language processing, with the hypothesis of shared electrophysiological correlates with wake language production.MethodsFrom a sample of 155 Highly frequent STs, we recorded 13 participants (age range 19–30 years, mean age 24.6 ± 3.3; 7F) via vPSG for at least two consecutive nights, and a total of 28 nights. We first investigated the sleep macrostructure of STs compared to 13 age and gender-matched subjects. We then compared the EEG signal before 21 Verbal STs versus 21 Nonverbal STs (moaning, laughing, crying, etc.) in six STs reporting both vocalization types in Stage 2 NREM sleep.ResultsThe 2 × 2 mixed analysis of variance Group × Night interaction showed no...

If we were to look more closely at our dreamworlds, we might discover terrain as varied and compelling as any we have known while awake. And, once honed, our night vision could reveal the architecture of futuristic cities, the voice of a friend long dead, the attics of homes we once knew and have buried out of reach of waking memory. We might glimpse the spaceships of an alien culture, smell the sweet familiar scent of ripe corn, or spend an evening listening to the pulse of drumbeats around a tribal fire. The roads of our dreamworlds run through both space and time, linking what we have imagined, illuminating the movement of our lives in a rich brocade of metaphor."

Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2006

Realization of an intelligent human-machine interface requires us to investigate human mechanisms and implement them in a machine. This study focused on communication between speech production and speech perception within human brain and its realization in a cyber system. A physiological research based on electromyographic signals (Honda, 1996) suggested that speech communication in the human brain might be a topologically mapping between speech production and speech perception according to an analogous topology between motor and sensory representations. Following this hypothesis, we examined the relation among the muscle activation, articulatory movement, and acoustic output using a physiological articulatory model, and verified such speech communication in terms of a transformed auditory feedback (TAF) experiment. The model simulation indicated that there existed an invariant mapping from muscle activations (motor space) to articulations (kinematic space) via a coordinate consisting of force-dependent equilibrium positions, and this mapping from the motor space to kinematic space was unique. The motor-kinematic-acoustic deduction in the model simulation showed that the topologies were compatible from one space to another. In the TAF experiment, the speech production side showed clearly compensatory response for the perturbation in the feedback sound. This implied that there exists an efficient way of communicating between speech production and perception in the brain.

2015

After years garnering a reputation as outstanding research biologist, neuro-pathologist, medical theorist of the etiology of hysteria, even Cocaine experimenter, Freud now daringly applies his cumulative clinical observations and interpretive acumen to decoding the pictographic language of the common dream.“The Interpretation of Dreams,” (1900) emerges amidst a combination of wonder and ridicule from a Viennese medical community not uniformly swayed by Freud’s psychical turn. Working in his legendary “splendid isolation” Freud has produced a masterwork of scientific observation which, in chapters six and, especially seven, presents a detailed analysis of the two tiered structure, the motive force, the formal properties, and compositional grammar and syntax, of a ‘primary process’ vocabulary, the language of the deepest unconscious in which dream-meanings are spun. He has arrived at these landmark observations, and a scientific method of interpretation, through the conceptual syntheses of the biogenetic law; the unconscious as phylogenetically archaic; the primacy of early experience; the power of repression, fixation, and formal regression in sleep; a process he called the “dream-work;” and, most importantly, the sharply dichotomized ‘primary’ (impulsive) and ‘secondary’ (inhibitory) processes, as cognitive principles of mental functioning. Couched in his first topographical model of mind, (Ucs. Pcs Cs), the cornerstone of psychoanalytic metatheory, with the “Interpretation of Dreams” Freud establishes himself as the fountainhead of a general dynamic psychology. This presentation will cover in detail the mechanisms of the dream’s ‘primary process’—the actual code of dreams — and the “dream work” as laid out in chapter seven of the dream book. However, the dream’s manifest-latent structure, the various mechanisms of the “primary process,” the “dream-work,” and its “secondary revision,” I will suggest, reveal a precursor underlay in human cognition of proto-semiotic forms, exhibiting modes of meaning-making in statu nascendi only subsequently shaped into linguistic tropes and linearized through narrative form. I will, therefore, conclude with an eye toward a more contemporary, bio-semiotic, re-interpretation of some basic Freudian premises, updated from an interdisciplinary palate of disciplines such as neurobiology, semiotics, linguistics, dialogics, and narrative theory.

Frontiers for Young Minds, 2014

The "blind spot" or the deaf ears of brain and consciousness research: the control circuit of vocalization-vagusnerve-hearing - integrated via the Formatio reticularis 1) The evolutionary development of the ear as an organ for orientation, balance, communication, perception of danger and stimulation of cortical electrical potential. Every listening experience is associated with vegetative and psychological arousal. (p. 4) 2) Internal and external perception - about inner hearing and the perception of one's own voice 3) Hearing is not the same as seeing (p. 7) There are no tones or sound "out there", only periodic fluctuations in air pressure (Heinz v. Förster), which are transformed in the ear with the help of cochlear efferents into a spectral frequency pattern structured in time and space - a sound gestalt (already in the cochlea!). "Music is the hidden arithmetic activity of the soul, which is not conscious that it is calculating." (Leibniz) - in humans in their music and in their singing and in the same way in the singing of songbirds ! 4) Hearing and sound "consciousness" in vocal communication in songbirds in physical-spectral and harmonical sound order. The syrinx-vagus-ear control circuit and the “beautiful sound order”, the cosmos of bird song (p. 9) What it is like to sing and hear as a bird ("Thomas Nagel"), in vegetative arousal, in hearing their own song, the song of their fellow birds (m/f) and communicating together in the spectral matrix of their species (exactly measurable, calculable and analyzable in detail by octaving slowdown and spectral analysis) 5) Sound "Gestalt" - auditory perception and sound apperception (p. 16) auditory gestalt perception without visual metaphors - transformation of sound patterns into a temporally correlated sequence of nerve impulses