This document summarizes and discusses three sources about the relationship between imagination, dreams, and reality. It discusses how subtle suggestions can lead people to falsely recognize dream content as real experiences. It also examines cases of confabulation, where brain lesions impair one's ability to distinguish fiction from reality. Finally, it discusses how perception is constructed by the brain's models rather than directly experiencing an objective external world, and how even healthy individuals can have faulty cognitive processes.

1. M I C H A E L M A M A N
P H I L 4 5 0 S E M I N A R
Neuromatrix: The World as
Embodied in the Mind

2. What’s “real” and what is “fantasy”?
 University of Florence study
 Mazzoni and Loftus. “When Dreams Become Reality.” 1996.
 “Our interest is in whether dream content can be remembered as something
that occurred during the waking state…If people sometimes confuse
products of their imagination with actual experiences, they might also be
expected to occasionally confuse dream material with reality” (442-43).
 After a single subtle suggestion, participants falsely recognized items from
their dreams and thought that these items had been presented in a list that they
learned during the waking state.
 Implications for the study’s findings?

3. Confounding Confabulation:
Window into the Neuromatrix
•Drawing on empirical
data, Armin Schneider
and William Hirstein
illustrate the puzzling
nature of confabulation,
and how it can help us
better understand
the neural processes
involved in discerning
fiction from reality
• In the example of Clinical vs. nonclinical cases of
confabulation (e.g. Korsakoff’s syndrome, Capgra’s
syndrome)
○Brain lesions

4. Confounding Confabulation:
Window into the Neuromatrix (Part II)
 Connection between Orbitofrontal
cortex (OFC) & mediodorsal nucleus
 Derailment of processes to ascertain beliefs
 ‘checking mechanisms’ monitoring knowledge
domains damaged (Hirstein 179)
• Non clinical cases: Self-deception
○ Are “healthy”individuals involved in similar, but less
extreme forms of delusional thinking?
▪ ”…These phenomena (confabulations) in general are mirrored,
if to a much more minor degree, in the retrieval protocols of
normal subjects…”(Birgess and Shallice. “Confabulation and the
Control of Recollection.” 1996.)
• False memories (e.g. witness testimony)

5. “Making up the Mind” – Chris Frith
“The distinction between the mental and
the physical is…an illusion created by the
brain” (Frith 17).
• “Seeing through the Brain’s Illusions”
○ Consider brain injured patients and
examine how our knowledge can be
extended using “clues from a damaged
brain.”
• Human perception of the world not as direct
as subjectively experienced
• Complex, cognitive processes on
unconscious level → Brain makes numerous
unconscious inferences about the world, but
even for “healthy” individuals the processes
can be faulty

6. “Making up the Mind” (Part II)
 Examples: Hallucinations: Schizophrenia
vs Visual illusions in healthy individuals
 In both cases, resulting mental representations
are not always accurate depictions of reality.
 Imagining an action stimulates the same
brain regions that function when the
action is actually undertaken.
 Patients with phantom limb syndrome
 Experience sensations and visions
that seem convincingly real.
 “Perception [cannot be] of the world, but of
my brain’s model of the world” (Frith 132).

7. Is there a “Red Pill” to experience “Ultimate Reality”?
• Ultimately, cognitive systems are not
self- revealing. Experiences in our wakeful
state are lived out in our minds, just as our
dreams are.
• Can we examine the unfiltered “real”
objective external world?
○ How can we perceive the world as it
“truly is”, if the brain has already
decided what we are going to perceive?
• All “this complex activity is hidden from
us. So there is no need to be embarrassed.
Just go back to the party and have fun.”
(Frith p. 193).