A Machine that Dreams:
An Artistic Enquiry of Theories of
Dreaming and Mental Imagery
Ben Bogart
Ph.D. Candidate
ben@ekran.org
www.ekran.org
The purpose of this art-as-research is the
construction of a site-specific computational
artwork inspired by theories of dreaming and
mental imagery.
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Theories of Dreaming and
Mental Imagery
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Activation-Synthesis (AS) (Hobson, 1977)
Activation I/O Gating / Modulation (AIM) (2009)
Random brain-stem (PGO) activation of sensory
regions. (bottom-up)
Dreams as Imagination (Nir and Tononi, 2010)
Dreams as activation of abstract sensory
representations. (top-down)
Perceptual Anticipation (Kosslyn, 2003)
Mental images as the explicit construction of
images in early VC from LTM.
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Aside: Dream Function
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AIM: Dreams as virtual reality (VR) for
development and maintenance of “proto-self”.
VR as environment to learn without
consequences.
Day-Dreaming could also provide similar
predictive mentation. (Schooler 2011)
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Bottom-Up
Top-Down
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Integrative Interpretation
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Mental images, perception and dreams all result
from the activation of the same high level
sensory representations.
Dreams are initiated by latent activation left
over from perception.
Dreams and mental images result from greater
endogenous activation while perception is more
exogenous.
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Integrative Interpretation
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System Design
1.Gating of external stimulus
2.Shared representations between dreaming,
imagery and perception
3.No explicit images in early visual cortex
4.Perception, day-dreaming and dreaming are
contiguous.
5.States are modulated by a circadian clock
entrained by the brightness of visual stimulus.
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Perception
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1. External Stimulus
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2. Segmentation (BG)
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2. Segmentation (FG)
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3. Clustering
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4. Sort by Feature
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5. Activation
Every Clustered Percept
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6. Propagation
Decays proportionally to habituation
Continuous external stimulus drowns out weaker
propagated activations.
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Day-Dreaming
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1. Activation
High habituation limits activation
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2. Propagation
Activation decays with habituation
Lack of activation allows weaker propagated
activations to be visible
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Dreaming
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1. Activation
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External stimulus gated by circadian clock.
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Initiated by latent activation from perception
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2. Propagation
Oscillates between amplification and decay
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References
Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of
protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(11), 803–813.
Hobson, J. A., & McCarley, R. W. (1977). The brain as a dream state generator:
an activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process. American Journal of
Psychiatry, 134(12), 1335.
Kosslyn, S. M., & Thompson, W. L. (2003). When is early visual cortex
activated during visual mental imagery?. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 723.
Nir, Y., & Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to
neurophysiology. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(2), 88–100.
Schooler, J. W., Smallwood, J., Christoff, K., Handy, T. C., Reichle, E. D., &
Sayette, M. A. (2011). Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the
wandering mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(7), 319–326.
doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.05.006
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