CONSCIOUSNESS

134 3. Cognitive Sciences and Psychology
see/experience, in dreams, the one-on-one limb positioning they practice so much, awake? Do
they see/experience a demonstrator? Group symmetry? Synchronicity? While biological motion’s
“pendular motions of the limb” are processed by the STSp, motion and object pathways
(Grossman, 2002), dance kinematics are processed by mirror neuron areas related to MT/
V5 and the STSp: right premotor, bilateral early visual, and parietal cortices (Calvo-Merino,
2008). Calvo-Merino’s 2006 study of awake dancers supports mirror system motor simulation.
She dissociates motor skill from the dancer’s visual familiarity with an action. When observing
motion, dancers’ mirror neurons respond according to their “specific motor expertise,”
simulating a purely motor response over and above visual representations of action (Calvo-
Merino 2006). Action observation involves the left premotor cortex, intraparietal cortex bilaterally,
cerebellum bilaterally. Awake mirror motor simulation could facilitate a dancer’s synchronization
(Calvo-Merino, 2006). (For Antrobus, REM visual features may be interpreted
as spatial form in the parietal cortex.) People recognize their face in a mirror ‘mapping their
own image onto the self’ (Iacoboni). Dancers’ mirror neurons may map motion, reinforcing
motor system and mirror response. If awake mirror neurons link, through seeing, feeling to
motor, might a dream-time ‘matching-system’ reverse-link feeling-movement-seeing? P3
182 The Dreaming Brain/Mind, Dissociation and the Psychoses: Connecting States of
Consciousness Armando D’Agostino, Ivan Limosani; Silvio Scarone (Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy)
In the first of his Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States, William James stated:
?Sleep would be a dreadful disease but for its familiarity [?] We do not regard dreaming as
morbid because it is customary, but if it were not, it would be the subject of much medical
wonder.? Thus, over a century ago, sleep and dreams were recognized as highly peculiar
phenomena, enigmatic and somewhat pathological. The dreaming brain/mind is the biological
proof that subjective experiences are possible in absence of sensorimotor activity: the dreaming
world, though internally generated, is complete with its objects, spaces and actors which
interact in often quite complicated events. The study of the isolated brain during dream sleep
therefore appears central to the debate on the neural underpinnings of consciousness. On the
other side, the peculiar characteristics of the dream experience, lacking space and time parameters
and rich in illogical and bizarre thoughts, with the absence of insight over the ‘objective’
dreaming experience, suggest an intriguing similarity between the cognitive organization of
the physiological dreaming brain and that of psychotic mental states. In psychiatry, dreaming
has long been correlated to psychoanalytic theories which are often difficult to integrate
with modern conceptualizations of major disorders. To shift the attention on structural aspects
of dream mentation and their relationship to underlying neurobiological phenomena seems
useful in terms of applying new theories on this peculiar albeit physiological subjective experience
to pathological subjective experiences observed in psychiatric practice. Converging
data from independent lines of research seem to support the hypothesis of the dreaming brain/
mind as a model for psychosis, independent of diagnostic categorizations. Experimental study
designs that can bridge measurable aspects of the subjective experience of dreaming and acute
psychosis with their neurobiological substrates are in an early stage of development. Recent
neurophysiological data have begun to emerge on lucid dreams, a dissociated state of consciousness
along the sleep-wakefulness continuum within which the dreamer becomes aware
of the hallucinatory nature of his own experience. This type of hybrid state may prove useful
in understanding the cognitive construct of insight applied to acute psychotic states as well as
dissociative disorders. Research into the pharmacological induction of lucidity, which appears
to be associated with cortical cholinergic modulation modifying the activity of the limbic and
prefrontal cortices, may shed light on neurobiological underpinnings of consciousness and of
abnormal brain/mind conditions found in schizophrenic and affective psychoses. The subjective
experience of dreaming can be conceptualized as a physiological psychosis and given that
neurobiological data shedding light onto this type of experience is now beginning to emerge,
it seems timely to bridge this broad area of knowledge across to psychiatric research with the
aim of building a solid methodological implant that may prove of use in the understanding of
complex disorders. C11