A differentiating empirical linguistic analysis of dreamer activity in reports of EEG-controlled REM-dreams and hypnagogic hallucinations

As we fall asleep we forget about the future: A quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports from hypnagogia

“…noted that strictly speaking, the tool measures memories of memories of the future and past, as well as of thoughts about the present, as they occur in offline mentation reports delivered only after the mentation experience itself -a methodological necessity in empirical dream research (Wamsley, 2013;Windt, 2013). An advantage of the quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports is that it presents a conservative measure in so far as it looks for differences in the mental events as they are expressed as pre-defined linguistic differences in the reports from different experimental conditions (Speth et al, 2013). The high agreement achieved by the report raters in the current study as well as in related studies (Speth, Speth et al, 2016;Speth, Harley et al, 2016;Speth & Speth, 2016b;Speth et al, 2013Speth et al, , 2015Speth & Speth, in press), despite the fact that they did not receive intense training or possess a psycholinguistic background, suggests.…”

“…grammatical agencies connected to the semantic field of cognition, describing cognitive acts such as thinking, remembering, or planning. It has been used in different versions to successfully link degrees of linguistic references to motor imagery in mentation reports with motor cortical activation of the respective state of consciousness (Speth, Frenzel, & Voss, 2013), to investigate the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on motor imagery (Speth et al, 2015;Speth & Speth, 2016a), and to measure the number of linguistic indications of auditory verbal hallucinations and inner speech in different states of consciousness (Speth, Harley, & Speth, 2016), as well as to investigate memory for the future across states of consciousness (Speth, Schloerscheidt, & Speth, submitted for publication). The second part of the current tool is based on the cognitive-semantic theory of mental spaces by Fauconnier and Turner (Fauconnier, 1994;Fauconnier & Turner, 1997): The method of analysing future, past, and present mental spaces was developed for this study in order to measure if instances of cognitive agency introduced references to future, past, or present scenarios that were imagined or recalled by the participants relative to the mentation time.…”

Transcranial direct current stimulation of the motor cortex in waking resting state induces motor imagery

“…Motor imagery was measured with a quantitative linguistic tool: motor agency analysis. Agency analysis has been used in previous studies, and has been shown to be a reliable tool ( Speth et al, 2015 andSpeth et al, 2013). Study participants were computer randomized to the stimulation conditions.…”

“…The linguistic tool used for the rating is based on linguistic theta theory (Gruber, 2001, Reinhart, 2002and Reinhart and Siloni, 2005. A first version of the tool has been used successfully to link degrees of linguistic references to motor imagery in mentation reports with characteristic motor cortical activation of states of consciousness (Speth et al, 2013). In a modified version, the tool has been used to investigate differences in degrees of auditory verbal hallucinations across states of consciousness (Speth et al, 2015).…”

“…Such mental representations of movement without analogous body movement (Guillot & Collet, 2005) occur regularly and spontaneously, especially in states with naturally high motor cortical activation, such as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (Desseilles et al, 2011, Dresler et al, 2011, Porte and Hobson, 1996and Speth et al, 2013, and have been associated with motor learning and rehearsal (Hobson, 2009 andWalker et al, 2002). Motor simulation tasks can also be purposefully used in waking to benefit specific motor performances (Arora et al, 2011, Driskell et al, 1994, Jackson et al, 2006, Meister et al, 2004and Schuster et al, 2011.…”