Abstraction No. 7

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Why Do We Dream?

Medium Musings on memories and Darwin machines In a recent post, I looked at consciousness from the perspective of the prefrontal synthesis model. In this view, our experience of the world is mediated by neuronal ensembles, collections of neurons that fire in synchrony when activated. ObjectNEs, as these circuits are called, organize our sensations according to the principle that ‘what fires together wires together.’ By their very nature, ObjectNEs consolidate the buzzing booming confusion around us, condensing our model of the world into a manageable number of perceptual building blocks. ObjectNEs are active during sensory integration, but they can also be ‘pinged’ deliberately by the prefrontal cortex, the planning center at the front of the brain. The purposeful activation of a sequence of ObjectNEs is what we mean when we talk about a “train of thought”. ObjectNEs can also light up spontaneously in unexpected combinations, a process that we experience as dreaming or hallucinating. ...
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