Friday, 1 March 2013
“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.”
“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a
continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that
creation.”
Researchers Creating Database of Photos That Elicit Human Emotions
http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/25/scientists-creating-database-of-photos-that-elicit-human-emotions/
Researchers Creating Database of Photos That Elicit Human Emotions
Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium are embarking on an interesting mission, and they need the help of willing photographers. What they’re attempting to do is create a database of photos based on how they make the viewer feel. The project and website, dubbed Pictures With Feelings, can then be used to further our knowledge about human emotion and how specific moods come about. Where you folks come is in providing the most emotionally stimulating images buried in your archives.
Research
This website is created to support a research
project of the Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual
Differences of the KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium).
The goal of the project is to create a
contemporary database of pictures that can be used to study the wide
range of emotions people can experience.
In order to create such a database, we need a large number of pictures that can be used to elicit or communicate feelings ranging from feeling very bad, over neutral, to very good, and ranging from feeling very passive to feeling very active.
You can contribute to this project by uploading your own pictures to this website. All types of pictures all welcome: pictures of people (emotional expressions, actions,…), animals, scenes (nature, city skylines,…) and objects.
The picture set will be complete as soon as we have fully covered the so-called valence-arousal space. Allow me to briefly explain this. Emotions can be said to differ along two dimensions (see figure below): valence (ranging from negative to positive) and arousal (ranging from passive to active). This gives rise to four quadrants, and a neutral point at the crossing of both dimensions. We would like to ask you to situate your picture(s) in this emotional space by rating the level of valence and arousal that you think the picture will elicit in people looking at it, i.e.,
In order to create such a database, we need a large number of pictures that can be used to elicit or communicate feelings ranging from feeling very bad, over neutral, to very good, and ranging from feeling very passive to feeling very active.
You can contribute to this project by uploading your own pictures to this website. All types of pictures all welcome: pictures of people (emotional expressions, actions,…), animals, scenes (nature, city skylines,…) and objects.
The picture set will be complete as soon as we have fully covered the so-called valence-arousal space. Allow me to briefly explain this. Emotions can be said to differ along two dimensions (see figure below): valence (ranging from negative to positive) and arousal (ranging from passive to active). This gives rise to four quadrants, and a neutral point at the crossing of both dimensions. We would like to ask you to situate your picture(s) in this emotional space by rating the level of valence and arousal that you think the picture will elicit in people looking at it, i.e.,
Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming
http://labnic.unige.ch/nic/papers/MD_TTDV_VS_SS_ConCog2011.pdf
Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming
Cognitive and emotional processes during dreaming
Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive
and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly
abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings
from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral
correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results
show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We
demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain activity during sleep explains
many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the
activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data
of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of
dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dream-
ing in some important functions such as emotional regulation
Dreaming represents a major facet of human experience. Yet, the nature of the dream-state is highly subjective and a gen-
uinely personal experience making a scientific analysis of dreaming somewhat prohibitive. Dreaming is a state of conscious-
ness characterized by internally-generated sensory-motor, verbal, cognitive and emotional experiences, which may unfold in
actions and events forming imaginary plotsDreaming, Depression, and How Sleep Affects Emotions
(http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/dreaming-depression-and-how-sleep-affects-emotions/261051/)
For the past half-century, sleep researcher Rosalind D. Cartwright has produced some of the most compelling and influential work in the field, enlisting modern science in revising and expanding the theories of Jung and Freud about the role of sleep and dreams in our lives. In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (public library), Cartwright offers an absorbing history of sleep research, at once revealing how far we've come in understanding this vital third of our lives and how much still remains outside our grasp.
One particularly fascinating aspect of her research deals with dreaming as a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM sleep and depression:
But what has perplexed researchers is that when these depressed patients are awakened 5 minutes into the first REM sleep episode, they're unable to explain what they are experiencing. This complete lack of dream recall in depression has showed up in study after study, but it's been unclear whether it's due to patients' reluctance to talk with researchers or to truly not forming and experiencing any dreams. That's where recent technology has helped shed light:
Brain imaging technology has helped to shed light on this mystery. Scanning depressed patients while they sleep has shown that the emotion areas of the brain, the limbic and paralimbic systems, are activated at a higher level in REM than when these patients are awake. High activity in these areas is also common in REM sleep in nondepressed sleepers, but the depressed have even higher activity in these areas than do healthy control subjects. This might be expected -- after all, while in REM these individuals also show higher activity in the executive cortex areas, those associated with rational thought and decision making. Nondepressed controls do not exhibit this activity in their REM brain imaging studies. This finding has been tentatively interpreted....as perhaps a response to the excessive activity in the areas responsible for emotions.
Cartwright spent nearly three decades investigating "how a mood disorder that affects cognition, motivation, and most of all the emotional state during waking shows itself in dreams." What proved particularly difficult was understanding the basis for this poor dream recall during REM sleep, since anti-depressants suppress that stage of the sleep cycle, but early research suggested that this very suppression of REM might be the mechanism responsible for reinvigorating the depressed.
This brings us to the regulatory purpose of dreaming. Cartwright explains:
Towards the end of the book, Cartwright explores the role of sleep and dreaming in consolidating what we call"the self," with another admonition against memory's self-editing capacity:
Dreaming, Depression, and How Sleep Affects Emotions
Exploring decades of sleep research on everything from disorders like sleepwalking and insomnia to the role of sleep in knowledge retention, ideation, and problem-solving.
For the past half-century, sleep researcher Rosalind D. Cartwright has produced some of the most compelling and influential work in the field, enlisting modern science in revising and expanding the theories of Jung and Freud about the role of sleep and dreams in our lives. In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives (public library), Cartwright offers an absorbing history of sleep research, at once revealing how far we've come in understanding this vital third of our lives and how much still remains outside our grasp.
One particularly fascinating aspect of her research deals with dreaming as a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM sleep and depression:
The more severe the depression, the earlier the first REM begins. Sometimes it starts as early as 45 minutes into sleep. That means these sleepers' first cycle of NREM sleep amounts to about half the usual length of time. This early REM displaces the initial deep sleep, which is not fully recovered later in the night. This displacement of the first deep sleep is accompanied by an absence of the usual large outflow of growth hormone. The timing of the greatest release of human growth hormone (HGH) is in the first deep sleep cycle. The depressed have very little SWS [slow-wave sleep, Stages 3 and 4 of the sleep cycle] and no big pulse of HGH; and in addition to growth, HGH is related to physical repair. If we do not get enough deep sleep, our bodies take longer to heal and grow. The absence of the large spurt of HGH during the first deep sleep continues in many depressed patients even when they are no longer depressed (in remission).
The first REM sleep period not only begins too early in the night in people who are clinically depressed, it is also often abnormally long. Instead of the usual 10 minutes or so, this REM may last twice that. The eye movements too are abnormal -- either too sparse or too dense. In fact, they are sometimes so frequent that they are called eye movement storms.
But what has perplexed researchers is that when these depressed patients are awakened 5 minutes into the first REM sleep episode, they're unable to explain what they are experiencing. This complete lack of dream recall in depression has showed up in study after study, but it's been unclear whether it's due to patients' reluctance to talk with researchers or to truly not forming and experiencing any dreams. That's where recent technology has helped shed light:
Brain imaging technology has helped to shed light on this mystery. Scanning depressed patients while they sleep has shown that the emotion areas of the brain, the limbic and paralimbic systems, are activated at a higher level in REM than when these patients are awake. High activity in these areas is also common in REM sleep in nondepressed sleepers, but the depressed have even higher activity in these areas than do healthy control subjects. This might be expected -- after all, while in REM these individuals also show higher activity in the executive cortex areas, those associated with rational thought and decision making. Nondepressed controls do not exhibit this activity in their REM brain imaging studies. This finding has been tentatively interpreted....as perhaps a response to the excessive activity in the areas responsible for emotions.
Cartwright spent nearly three decades investigating "how a mood disorder that affects cognition, motivation, and most of all the emotional state during waking shows itself in dreams." What proved particularly difficult was understanding the basis for this poor dream recall during REM sleep, since anti-depressants suppress that stage of the sleep cycle, but early research suggested that this very suppression of REM might be the mechanism responsible for reinvigorating the depressed.
This brings us to the regulatory purpose of dreaming. Cartwright explains:
Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread -- they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention.
I propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of 'who I am and what is good for me and what is not.' In this way, dreaming diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made -- from wife to widow or married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.
Towards the end of the book, Cartwright explores the role of sleep and dreaming in consolidating what we call"the self," with another admonition against memory's self-editing capacity:
[In] good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day's input.
Sleep is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached, as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our identity. One function of all this action, I believe, is to regulate disturbing emotion in order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning.
sleep locks in bad memories
"Sleeping after a traumatic event might lock in bad memories and emotions, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst asked more than 100 healthy adults to rate their emotional responses to a series of images, some depicting unsettling scenes. Twelve hours later, they rated the images again. The difference: Half of the subjects slept during the break; the other half did not.
"Not only did sleep protect the memory, but it also protected the emotional reaction," said Rebecca Spencer, a neuroscientist at UMass Amherst and co-author of the study that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Study subjects who stayed awake for 12 hours had a weaker emotional response to the unsettling images the second time around, suggesting sleep serves to preserve and even amplify negative emotions. Their memories were also weaker than those of their well-rested counterparts, as they struggled to remember whether they had seen the images before.
"It's true that 'sleeping on it' is usually a good thing to do," said Spencer, citing evidence that sleep boosts memory and other cognitive functions. "It's just when something truly traumatic or out of the ordinary happens that you might want to stay awake."
Spencer said people often find it difficult to sleep after a traumatic event.
"This study suggests the biological response we have after trauma might actually be healthy," she said. "Perhaps letting people go through a period of insomnia before feeding them sleeping meds is actually beneficial."
While the findings may have implications for post traumatic stress disorder, Spencer emphasized that daily emotional ups and downs are not grounds for sleep deprivation.
"Just because we have a bad day doesn't mean we should stay awake," she said. "We need to maintain some memories and emotional context to know what to avoid. We do learn something from them."
Although sleep gives the body some much-needed rest, the brain stays active. Spencer used polysomnography to monitor brain activity in some sleeping subjects.
"REM sleep in particular was associated with a change in how emotional you found something," she said. "We think there are parts of the brain being activated during sleep that allow us to process those emotions more than during day."
Next, Spencer plans to study the link between sleep and memory in the context of aging. With age, the amount of time spent sleeping drops dramatically.
"We want to know if those changes actually underlie some of the cognitive and behavioral changes that occur with age," she said."
Video portrait captures Beckham asleep
Video portrait captures Beckham asleep
Iconic imagery ... Contemplating Sam Taylor-Wood's video portrait of David Beckham.
- The Guardian,
Iconic imagery ... Contemplating Sam Taylor-Wood's video portrait of David Beckham.
"His waking hours may be full of turbulence and anxiety, as claims and counter-claims are flung around about his sex life. But at least David Beckham can sleep like a baby - or so it would seem from a portrait of the footballer by Sam Taylor-Wood, to be unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery today.The portrait, simply called David, is a 107-minute film of Beckham slumbering in bed, a drift of blond locks cascading on to a white pillow. Somewhat less eventful than the average Real Madrid match, the film shows Beckham tenderly cradling his head in his startlingly hairy forearms, occasionally stirring to reveal a hint of shoulder tattoo, a nipple or a touch of lower torso.Beckham (on this evidence at least) has no unpleasant sleep habits, such as snoring or dribbling. His mouth remains firmly closed, though there is the odd twitch of the lips and even the occasional tantalising half-smile.Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, said: "It took a long time to arrange, but what turned out to be very simple was that with Real Madrid the players have a training session in the morning, followed by a long siesta."Taylor-Wood, who was nominated for the Turner prize, made the work in a Madrid hotel room in January. "He really is asleep," said Mr Nairne.Claims about Beckham's alleged infidelity may have rekindled the debate about privacy and the press, but ironically, Taylor-Wood's image is almost transgressive in its intimacy. The film is shot at Beckham's eye level, such that the viewer might almost imagine him or herself lying beside the star. The figure appears strikingly vulnerable.The image is also unashamedly beautiful. Beckham's limbs and face are warmly lit, looming out of a Caravaggio-esque gloom. The curves of his musculature and honeyed tone of his skin are sensuously conveyed. This is a David as physically perfect as Michelangelo's."
DAVID
BY SAM TAYLOR-WOOD
A new video portrait of David Beckham by international artist Sam Taylor-Wood will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery from Tuesday 27 April 2004. The portrait has been commissioned by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery and made possible by JPMorgan through the Fund for New Commissions.
David is an intimate portrait, which was shot in a single long take. Beckham was filmed sleeping, after training in Madrid. Simply lit from one light source this rich, painterly film presents a reverential and vulnerable image of this international football icon.
Born in Leytonstone, East London, in 1975, David Beckham had scored over 100 goals for his childhood team, Ridgeway Wanderers, by the age of eight. In 1991 he signed to play for Manchester United and made his first-team debut four years later. Beckham was named "Young Player of the Year" in the 1996/7 season and won his first England Cap in September 1997. In 1999 he helped Manchester United win the "Treble", playing some of the best football of his career. Beckham was appointed England captain in 2000 and led England to a memorable 5-1 victory over Germany in the 2002 World Cup qualifying round. In July 2003, Beckham left Manchester United to play for Real Madrid. Much attention will be on Beckham again this summer as England captain for the 2004 European Championships in Portugal.
Sam Taylor-Wood (b.1967) graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1990. Her work in photography and film has won her much international critical acclaim, including the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale (1997) and a Turner Prize nomination (1998). Taylor-Wood is at the forefront of the new generation of contemporary British art. Since her first solo exhibition at White Cube in 1995, she has had numerous solo exhibitions, including being the youngest artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition at The Hayward Gallery. Taylor-Wood is currently working with Ray Winstone on a feature film based on the life of William Blake and will be exhibiting a new body of work in September 2004 in New York.
Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, said : "Sam Taylor-Wood offers a compelling view of David Beckham as he lies asleep. It is an intriguing and intimate portrait of one of England's finest footballers and we are delighted that we have been able to commission it with the support of JPMorgan."
Sam Taylor-Wood said : "Making a portrait of a much-photographed man like David Beckham was a challenge. I wanted to create a direct, closely observed study. Filming while he was asleep produces a different view from the many familiar, public images".
JPMorgan said : "We are proud to continue our long-standing commitment to the arts through the creation of the Fund for New Commissions with the National Portrait Gallery. We believe that investment in this fund will provide a platform for future development of new portraits and encourage the ongoing support for new and emerging artists."
David by Sam Taylor Wood will be displayed in Room 41a from 27th April 2004
Notes to Editors
- Sam Taylor-Wood's Self-portrait in single-breasted suit with hare was acquired by the Gallery in 2002
- David Beckham is represented by four portraits in the Photographs Collection by Nadav Kander, Lorenzo Agius and Dean Freeman (with Victoria Beckham)
- David is 1hour 7 minutes long and is shown as a continuous loop on a 40" 4:3 Plasma screen. (http://www.npg.org.uk/about/press/david-beckham.php)
more sleep images
Of all the images I have captured of my self sleeping I have picked out and edited the best ones which I will add the the previous ones when making my final edit of 6.
I have a black and white and a colour version of each image although i think after discovering that 80% of people claim to dream in colour, along with the evidence from the experiment where sleepers were woken and asked to select colours from a chart and the most frequently selected colours were soft pastels I will go with the colour images.)
I have a black and white and a colour version of each image although i think after discovering that 80% of people claim to dream in colour, along with the evidence from the experiment where sleepers were woken and asked to select colours from a chart and the most frequently selected colours were soft pastels I will go with the colour images.)
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