When you dream or remember things in your mind, what exactly is powering that? Are photons actually flying around in your brain? I’m not exactly a chemistry expert, but I hope I could probably understand any explanations anyone could give. Thanks for any future enlightenment you guys can give.
Well, I’d say there are no “photons flying around” in the brain. As a WAG, I’d say remembering images or dreaming is the mind recalling, from the visual centre, how something looked, down to shading, light, and colour. Sort of like a digital camera storing images, before download into a computer drive. An organic version of the memory of pixels, as it were.
Uh, I don’t think you know what photons are. Photons are particles of light. At no time have there ever been photons in your brain. I am assuming here that you have not taken George Carlin seriously, and that you have not at any time split open your skull for the refreshing feeling of the air on your brain.
Photons go in your eyes all the time. The retina catches them, and the eye sends signals via the nerves to the brain.
IIRC from other threads on dreaming, your brain is doing random firing during REM sleep, and the cerebral cortex keeps trying to make sense of the signals. Your sensory centers get involved, and you have wacky experiences in your head that don’t make much sense. Those are your dreams.
What about when you remember stuff?
And I guess I don’t know what photons are. I’m really just looking for some insight into this. Maybe an explanation of you see when you see things in your head.
Photons are flying through your brain all the time, Cardinal. They’re just at lower frequency/energy then light (and sometimes higher frequency). Radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, and gamma rays are all just lower/higher energy photons then visible light.
On to the OP. Disclaimer, I am not a neurobiologist.
First off, the processes involved in memory storage and retrieval and in dreaming have not been exactly determined. There are quite a few theories out there.
The way neurons work: a neuron ‘fires’ quickly when its ‘input’ neurons are firing quickly enough. With each neuron having connections to and/or from around 10000 other neurons, there is a lot that can happen.
The brain is divided into a lot of different pieces. Your eyes are connected through the optic nerves to the visual cortex. Your ears are connected to the audio cortex. Et cetera.
Your visual cortex processes the signals coming in from your eyes in many different ways. There’s a part that identifies horizontal lines, there’s a part that identifies vertical lines, there’re parts for identifying numerous different shapes, there’re parts for identifying motion, etc. Basically, there’s a lot of stuff going on under the hood in the visual cortex.
During and after all this processing that happens in the visual cortex, the concious part of you picks and chooses the interesting stuff to look at. If you want to know how this happens and why there’s a concious part and how it works, you are not alone. No one knows for sure how this works, though there is active research happening in this area along with a large number of theories.
One theory about how memories are processed proposes that our memories aren’t really pictures stored and ready for slideshow playback. They’re actually formed by linking together many different ideas and concepts. So when you smell that warm cookie smell, the group of neurons that hold the “warm cookie smell recognition” are activated. Those neurons are linked to other concepts, such as “grandma” and “warm summer afternoon” and “grandma’s house” and so on. All these come together and your conciousness forms them into a scene, and a memory of sitting at the table eating freshly baked cookies at grandma’s house with grandma in her apron talking with your mom forms in your conciousness.
On dreaming, Cardinal’s explanation is actually only one theory among a few that are held in high regard. I won’t list any other theories because I don’t know enough not to slaughter them.
The main problem with your question, xvxdarkknightxvx, is that no one knows for certain how all this works, but I hope I’ve been helpful.
Not only do photons pass through your brain from the outside, they are absolutely necessary for your brain (and the rest of you to work). A photon is not just a particle of light, it is the fundamental carrier of the electromagnetic force in the Standard Model, and is exchanged between two charged particles whenever an interaction between them takes place. This includes all chemical reactions, including the ones in your brain, and in electric fields, also present in your brain.
That was illuminating, LtningBug. Thanks. I guess I’ll just have to wait till they figure all this out. 
I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you 
As it happens, it turns out that dreams are not necessarily limited to the R.E.M. stage of sleep. They can also occur in any of the other stages of sleep too.
The last paper I read that tried to put forward a neurophysiological model of sleep indicated that the origins of the stimuli for dreams are deep in the older structures of the brain, and that part of the circuitry includes the pre-frontal cortex. This was hypothesized to be responsible for trying to integrate, what was effectively ‘noise’ into the various cognitive models of the world that are utilized in the pfc to understand what goes on in the day to day running of your conscious life (oo-er).
One problem in the neural-network account of cognitive processes that is discussed elsewhere in this thread is that it neglects the activity of central pattern generators. There are networks of neurons that pulse and create activity from within the brain independant to externally derivied stimuli. It is misleading within many accounts of neural network or PDP models to conceive of neurons in the brain as inactive or in a ‘0’ state (off state). This is a mathematical convenience of the simplified modelling that goes on in neural networking. They are better thought of as being in a relatively lower state of neural activation (or resting state), and being ‘active’ (or ‘1’ state - or whatever in the nn model) as being a relatively higher state of activation. The rest of this account requires the propogation of activation from one neuron to the next to exceed the threshold of the receiving neuron in the network. What I have just described (if that isn’t baffling enough) is part of the assumption that the frequency of neural impulses is a key to the encoding of information that it is believed to be signalling about. This is not necessarily the whole story, as the intensity and duration of neural firing could equally contain useful informational content. It may also be the pattern of synchronized activity that is important in transmitting information.
What it boils down to is this, from my relatively garbled account. Neuropsychological theory is still in its infancy and the neural engineering approach is still way too simple to be really capturing much of what is actually going on in real brains. Not to say that the field of research is useless (hey I did several years of it for my sins), but as someone else wisely said - don’t go holding your breath for a complete answer!