#uncounscious

Last night I dreamt that I was heavily pregnant and close to giving birth, my feelings in  the dream were intense; I was desperate to have the baby but terrified of going in to labour. I was in a dream-identical living-room as the one in the shared house that I live in now. I remember scratching my toe nails on the floor boards and thinking "This is no place for my child, the floorboards are so dirty; they are so sad" I then spiraled into a poetic conversation with my partner on how the house was too sad to live in. This caused my boyfriend to exclaim that he was going to leave me. A thought so awful even in dreaming life caused me to switch scenes.

In the next scene I was removed from all dignity, legs splayed and strapped and wires in my nose as I was going into labour in a futuristic-like hospital room. I then felt a huge amount of pain and the doctor gave me a gum shield to bite that tasted of iron. The amount of pain I was feeling ceased instantly and I felt suddenly serene, but only for a moment. It became known to me that I was now comatose. I could slightly see the baby being passed to my boyfriend and the doctor cutting the umbilical cord but I could not move, I was paralysed.

So I just woke up from this dream. In it was all my old friends, I was back at my old school and we were at lunch. It was a total mean girl scene, where my old friends were dissing me. Talking about me on the low. I could feel the hatred. But this time I was different, I was bold and unapologetic. Immediately I asked them if they were talking about me and why. They told me and I answered. But I was soon interrupted. Although I didn't get to finish explaining myself, I saw them change towards me a little bit. if only I got to finish though. this dream is probably my inner self longing to make up with old friends. or me just wanting to stand up for myself because I never feel like I got to in the past.

Another scene in my dream was me at my current school, feeling like a loner. I had all these "friends" or people I knew but I didn't feel included. In particular I dreamed about thinking I was invited somewhere but I really wasn't. When I got there I was turned around and told I couldn't chill with them because of something that happened the last time. My paranoia took over. So I left, speeding off, except for my driving was horrible and I felt like I would if I was driving in a video game. As I was speeding there was a girl from my school walking back. I wanted to ask her if she wanted a ride but I hesitated and never asked. I regretted doing so. This dream brought up emotions of being lonely, paranoia, and social anxiety.

by Janet Kwasniak

ScienceDaily has an item (here) on a paper by L Schwabe, M Tegenthoff, O Höffken, O Wolf; Mineralocorticoid Receptor Blockade Prevents Stress-Induced Modulation of Multiple Memory Systems in the Human Brain; Biological Psychiatry, 2013. It examines the switch from conscious learning to unconscious learning under stress conditions.

Conscious learning involves the hippocampus and declarative memory while unconscious learning involves the dorsal striatum and procedural memory. Stress causes alterations of amygdala connectivity with hippocampus and dorsal striatum to shift the learning method towards unconscious learning. Performance in learning tasks that can be learned both ways do not appear to be affected by this shift.

The researchers used a weather forecasting ‘game’ to measure performance. The subjects can work out how to do the forecasting through trial and error, either with conscious problem solving or by going with their gut feeling. They found that by blocking a particular receptor type, mineralocorticoid receptors, this switch under stress by adrenal cortex hormones no longer happened and performance suffered as a result. 

Here is part of the abstract:

Accumulating evidence suggests that stress may orchestrate the engagement of multiple memory systems in the brain. In particular, stress is thought to favor dorsal striatum-dependent procedural over hippocampus-dependent declarative memory. However, the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying these modulatory effects of stress remain elusive, especially in humans. Here, we targeted the role of the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) in the stress-induced modulation of dorsal striatal and hippocampal memory systems in the human brain using a combination of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging and pharmacologic blockade of the MR.

Our findings indicate that the stress-induced shift from hippocampal to dorsal striatal memory systems is mediated by the amygdala, required to preserve performance after stress, and dependent on the MR.