The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: A new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework and techniques for sleep-onset acceleration: the somnolent mentation framework. It distinguishes between somnolent, asomnolent and insomnolent mentation. Somnolent mentation inherently accelerates sleep onset (SO). Insomnolent mentation (e.g., deliberating, ruminating or focusing on one’s arousal) interferes with SO. Deliberate mentation approaches to insomnia attempt to influence the participant’s mentation at SO. They may prescribe somnolent or counter-insomnolent mentation. Existing deliberate mentation approaches attempt mainly to counter insomnolent mentation (e.g., thought control through imagery distraction). Thus they are at best counter-insomnolent. Super-somnolent mentation is both somnolent and counter-insomnolent. Extended SO (E-SO) is defined as the period just before SO (P-SO) combined with SO. A scientific challenge is to correctly classify features of mentation as somnolent, asomnolent and insomnolent. This classification should be done both from a phenomena-based perspective—e.g., the empirical study of E-SO mentation— and from a designer-based perspective (in terms of a theory of the architecture of the human mind). This paper proposes a secondary hypothesis: the E-SO mentation emulation hypothesis. To emulate somnolent features of P-SO mentation is somnolent. This paper proposes also that some types of incoherent mentation are super-somnolent. This paper presents no new empirical data. However, from the new conjectures, several predictions can be derived, new treatments developed, and new possibilities investigated. From the incoherent mentation principle the serial diverse imagining (SDI) family of techniques is derived. From this and related considerations SDI is expected to be super-somnolent.