Conscious experiences feel rich and hard to fully describe or recall, a puzzle that partly motivates the explanatory gap—the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical processes. This work offers an information-theoretic dynamical systems framework: richness corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state, and ineffability to information lost during processing. Attractor dynamics in working memory cause impoverished recollections, language's discrete symbolic nature cannot capture high-dimensional experiential structure, and similar cognitive function between individuals improves communicability. The model advances a physicalist explanation of these puzzling aspects, though it may not settle all questions about the explanatory gap.
Classical psychedelics produce complex visual hallucinations that are coherent at low levels but surreal at high levels, resembling dream-like states. The oneirogen hypothesis proposes that these perceptual effects arise because psychedelics induce neural activity states similar to dreaming. By simulating psychedelics' effects on neural network models trained with the Wake-Sleep algorithm—which alternates between a perceptual (wake) phase and a generative (dream) phase—partially shifting the model to the 'Sleep' state (increasing top-down connections, consistent with effects on apical dendrites) captures observed phenomena: hallucinations, increased stimulus-conditioned variability, and large synaptic plasticity increases. The hypothesis offers testable predictions for validation.