Disjunctive cognition

Last updated

Disjunctive cognition is a common phenomenon in dreams, first identified by psychoanalyst Mark Blechner, [1] in which two aspects of cognition do not match each other. The dreamer is aware of the disjunction, yet that does not prevent it from remaining. From Dr. Mark Blechner's The Dream Frontier, it states ”The specifics of bizarre dream experiences may be a source of data about the different levels of perceptual processing". [2] By careful examination of the experiences in dreams, we may gain insight into the workings of our mind/brains. The most frequent disjunction is between appearance and identity, such as "I knew it was my mother, even though it didn't look like her." [3] The dreamer recognizes a character's identity, even though the appearance does not match the identity. Character identity relates to facial recognition. In Blechner's The Dream Frontier he says "One theory of facial recognition is that the visual information passes from the retina through the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus and thence to the cortex, for discrimination of the features by the feature discrimination area". [4]  This is one example of data that can help validate Blechner's idea. He stated it is "a far-reaching hypothesis and will require a great deal of research to test it." [5] But, another piece of data to support it is that people almost always start off a recollection of a dream as "It was the strangest thing" [6] Such dreams are usually not experienced as bizarre, despite the fact that such a statement in waking life would be considered psychotic. In waking life, most people would assume that they misidentified the person and correct for it, but not in dreams. [3] An example of disjunctive cognition is "I was the opposite of what I actually look like. I was tall and lanky like Katharine Hepburn, but not particularly attractive (Fosshage and Loew, 1987, p. 10).” [7]

Disjunctive cognition can also involve time perception. It is quite common to dream that as an adult, one goes back to a time and place of one's childhood. In this case, the perceived age of the dreamer is disjunctive with the setting of the dream. It is much less common to perceive the opposite: dreaming of oneself as a child, where the time and place are that of one's adulthood. However, it is common to dream of other people whom one knew at an earlier age appearing in the present. This is especially frequent in the dreams of people who have lost close relatives. For example, Aharon Appelfeld reported: "I dreamed about my parents. They had not aged since we were together sixty-three years ago in Prague, and their faces expressed amazement that I had grown older. We were briefly united in mutual astonishment, and I knew that I had something important to tell them. But, as in every profound dream, I could not get the words out." [8]

Blechner calls disjunctive cognitions "the commonplace bizarreness of dreamlife." [9] Some things that happen in dreams feel bizarre to the dreamer, but disjunctive cognitions usually do not. Another commonplace bizarreness of dreams is the interobject, in which the dreamer sees something between two objects, as in: I dreamt of something "between a swimming pool and an aqueduct," or "between a cell-phone and a baby." This has led researchers to ask how people determine a specific character in a dream is their "mother" or "themselves" if they do not physically appear to be. This can give insight on a person's experience with disjunctive cognition and with the person they dreamed about. The way they saw their mother could more or less be the way they viewed them from an emotional standpoint. It can also reflect the kind of relationship they had with their mother or with themselves. [10] This can also open up a bigger insight on the meaning of dreams and how our minds work through problems we have throughout the day.

Disjunctive cognitions reveal much about how the brain is organized. Blechner has suggested that whenever disjunctive cognitions occur, the two aspects of cognition that are disjunctive are handled in different parts of the brain whose mutual integration is suppressed or shifted during sleep. Disjunctive cognitions between what the person looks like and who the person is suggest two brain systems for those aspects of perception. [11] This is supported by research in neuropsychology and neurobiology. For example, some people who have suffered strokes or other brain damage have a syndrome known as prosopagnosia. A prosopagnosic man may look at his wife of 50 years, see all of her features clearly, and yet not recognize who she is. In such people, the process of seeing is intact, but the process of facial recognition is damaged. [12]

There is also the phenomenon of Capgras syndrome, in which a person may feel that a close relative is actually an impostor. The features of the relative are recognizable, but the person's identity is not. [13] And there is also Fregoli delusion, in which a person may mistakenly identify strangers as people he actually knows. [14] In all of these syndromes, there is a disjunction between the appearance and perceived identity of the person.

Related Research Articles

In the psychology subfield of oneirology, a lucid dream is a type of dream wherein a person that is dreaming realizes that they are dreaming during their dream. The capacity to have lucid dreams is a trainable cognitive skill. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of volitional control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment, although this control of dream content is not the salient feature of lucid dreaming. An important distinction is that lucid dreaming is a distinct type of dream from other types of dreams such as prelucid dreams and vivid dreams, although prelucid dreams are a precursor to lucid dreams, and lucid dreams are often accompanied with enhanced dream vividness. Lucid dreams are also distinct state from other lucid boundary sleep states such as lucid hypnagogia or lucid hypnopompia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dream</span> Event occurring in the mind while sleeping

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this.

Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, another close family member, or pet has been replaced by an identical impostor. It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), the French psychiatrist who first described the disorder.

The Fregoli delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. The syndrome may be related to a brain lesion and is often of a paranoid nature, with the delusional person believing themselves persecuted by the person they believe is in disguise.

Delusional misidentification syndrome is an umbrella term, introduced by Christodoulou for a group of four delusional disorders that occur in the context of mental and neurological illness. They are grouped together as they often occur simultaneously or interchange, and they display the common concept of the double (sosie). They all involve a belief that the identity of a person, object, or place has somehow changed or has been altered. Christodoulu further categorized these disorders into those including hypo -identification of a well-known person, and hyper -identification of an unknown person. As these delusions typically only concern one particular topic, they also fall under the category called monothematic delusions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uncanny valley</span> Hypothesis that human replicas elicit revulsion

The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. Examples of the phenomenon exist among robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies has propagated discussions and citations of the "valley"; such conversation has enhanced the construct's verisimilitude. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting eerie feelings in viewers.

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Face perception</span> Cognitive process of visually interpreting the human face

Facial perception is an individual's understanding and interpretation of the face. Here, perception implies the presence of consciousness and hence excludes automated facial recognition systems. Although facial recognition is found in other species, this article focuses on facial perception in humans.

Cognitive neuropsychiatry is a growing multidisciplinary field arising out of cognitive psychology and neuropsychiatry that aims to understand mental illness and psychopathology in terms of models of normal psychological function. A concern with the neural substrates of impaired cognitive mechanisms links cognitive neuropsychiatry to the basic neuroscience. Alternatively, CNP provides a way of uncovering normal psychological processes by studying the effects of their change or impairment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oneirology</span> Scientific study of dreams

In the field of psychology, the subfield of oneirology is the scientific study of dreams. Research seeks correlations between dreaming and knowledge about the functions of the brain, as well as an understanding of how the brain works during dreaming as pertains to memory formation and mental disorders. The study of oneirology can be distinguished from dream interpretation in that the aim is to quantitatively study the process of dreams instead of analyzing the meaning behind them.

The syndrome of subjective doubles is a rare delusional misidentification syndrome in which a person experiences the delusion that they have a double or Doppelgänger with the same appearance, but usually with different character traits, that is leading a life of its own. The syndrome is also called the syndrome of doubles of the self, delusion of subjective doubles, or simply subjective doubles. Sometimes, the patient is under the impression that there is more than one double. A double may be projected onto any person, from a stranger to a family member.

Mirrored-self misidentification is the delusional belief that one's reflection in the mirror is another person – typically a younger or second version of one's self, a stranger, or a relative. This delusion occurs most frequently in patients with dementia and an affected patient maintains the ability to recognize others' reflections in the mirror. It is caused by right hemisphere cranial dysfunction that results from traumatic brain injury, stroke, or general neurological illness. It is an example of a monothematic delusion, a condition in which all abnormal beliefs have one common theme, as opposed to a polythematic delusion, in which a variety of unrelated delusional beliefs exist. This delusion is also classified as one of the delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS). A patient with a DMS condition consistently misidentifies places, objects, persons, or events. DMS patients are not aware of their psychological condition, are resistant to correction and their conditions are associated with brain disease – particularly right hemisphere brain damage and dysfunction.

A monothematic delusion is a delusional state that concerns only one particular topic. This is contrasted by what is sometimes called multi-thematic or polythematic delusions where the person has a range of delusions. These disorders can occur within the context of schizophrenia or dementia or they can occur without any other signs of mental illness. When these disorders are found outside the context of mental illness, they are often caused by organic dysfunction as a result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, or neurological illness.

An interobject is a dream phenomenon of an object intermediate or in between two other known objects.

Primary consciousness is a term the American biologist Gerald Edelman coined to describe the ability, found in humans and some animals, to integrate observed events with memory to create an awareness of the present and immediate past of the world around them. This form of consciousness is also sometimes called "sensory consciousness". Put another way, primary consciousness is the presence of various subjective sensory contents of consciousness such as sensations, perceptions, and mental images. For example, primary consciousness includes a person's experience of the blueness of the ocean, a bird's song, and the feeling of pain. Thus, primary consciousness refers to being mentally aware of things in the world in the present without any sense of past and future; it is composed of mental images bound to a time around the measurable present.

Prosopamnesia is a selective neurological impairment in the ability to learn new faces. There is a special neural circuit for the processing of faces as opposed to other non-face objects. Prosopamnesia is a deficit in the part of this circuit responsible for encoding perceptions as memories.

Folie à deux, also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are "transmitted" from one individual to another.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cotard's syndrome</span> Delusion that one is dead or non-existent

Cotard's syndrome, also known as Cotard's delusion or walking corpse syndrome, is a rare mental disorder in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Statistical analysis of a hundred-patient cohort indicated that denial of self-existence is present in 45% of the cases of Cotard's syndrome; the other 55% of the patients presented with delusions of immortality.

Oneirophobia is the fear of dreams. It is discussed in The Dream Frontier, a book by Mark Blechner, a neuro-psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute.

Covert facial recognition is the unconscious recognition of familiar faces by people with prosopagnosia. The individuals who express this phenomenon are unaware that they are recognizing the faces of people they have seen before.

References

  1. ↑ Blechner, M. J. (2001) 'The Dream Frontier'. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press
  2. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  3. 1 2 Blechner, M. J. "The Dream Frontier" . Retrieved 2009-04-01.
  4. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  5. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  6. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  7. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-12-03.
  8. ↑ Appelfeld, A. (2001) The Kafka connection, 'The New Yorker', July 23, p. 41
  9. ↑ Blechner, Mark J. (April 2005). "The Grammar of Irrationality". Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 41 (2): 203–221. doi:10.1080/00107530.2005.10745859. S2CID   147160282.
  10. ↑ "Dr. Mark J. Blechner | The Dream Frontier". www.markblechner.com. Retrieved 2019-12-03.
  11. ↑ Biechner, Mark J. (January 2000). "Confabulation in Dreaming, Psychosis, and Brain Injury: Commentary by Mark J. Blechner (New York)". Neuropsychoanalysis. 2 (2): 139–144. doi:10.1080/15294145.2000.10773296. S2CID   145547311.
  12. ↑ Bodamer, J. (1947) Die Prosopagnosie. 'Archiv Psychiatrische Nervenkrankheiten', 179:6-54.
  13. ↑ Josephs, Keith A. (1 December 2007). "Capgras Syndrome and Its Relationship to Neurodegenerative Disease". Archives of Neurology. 64 (12): 1762–1766. doi: 10.1001/archneur.64.12.1762 . PMID   18071040.
  14. ↑ DePauw, K.; Szulecka, T.; Poltock, T. (1987). "Fregoli syndrome after cerebral infarction". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 175 (7): 433–438. doi:10.1097/00005053-198707000-00008. PMID   3598572.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.