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Dreams Actually Virtual Reality Threat Simulation?
Time Slows Down writes "Psychology Today has an interesting story on a new theory of why we dream. Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios simulating emergency situations and providing an arena for safe training. 'The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations,' he says. We have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year — one to four per night and just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. Faced with actual life-or-death situations — traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults — people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. 'Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment,' Revonsuo says. 'Their function is to protect and prepare us.'"
That's one dream. The summary says that they're looking at 1 to 4 dreams a night, which indicates that the dreams they're talking about are the ones we don't remember.
The article covers *rats*, and it explains what happens to a small, limited rat brain when it can't dream. And yes, it explains *some* human dreaming. But, what is going on in my human head when I dream of dead loved ones? What does that prepare me for? Are my dreams of being naked in public just training ground to remind me to get dressed every morning? Or do they reflect buried insecurities or anxieties? Maybe dreams started as a way for our primitive, simple brains to train themselves to survive, but their reason for being today, in our more advanced brains, is still a mystery.
I'm the queer the atheists sent here to take away your gun!
Doesn't that make sense to a certain extent though? While you'll (hopefully) never face that exact situation, dealing with embarrassment is a very real danger, and clothing tends to be very easy to embarrass yourself with. Ripping your pants, wearing your shirt backwards, your zipper being down, etc, are all things that could happen basically any day of the week and would be embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as driving to work naked, but pretty embarrassing nonetheless.
Take, for example, the oft-cited 'I dreamt that I showed up to work/school/whatever naked/wearing only underwear.' Showing up to work naked isn't actually the real problem the brain is trying work out. The real problem is that the person is a afraid of being unprepared or being caught in an embarassing situation. They are usually insecure about something or other when they have dreams like this. This is the brain trying say "Hey, you! You're insecure about this or that, what are you doing to fix that?"
Of course, the imagery of dreams isn't always that universal. In your case, what do Einstein and Hawking represent for you? What about zebras? What does playing poker mean to you? Do you bluff a lot in poker? Or do you play on the merits of your cards? If you're a physicist, and just making guesses here about the zebra, I'd say that you that see Einstein and Hawking as a black-and-white dichotomy that needs to somehow be resolved. Maybe you think one of Hawking's theories and another of Einstein's are in deep conflict and maybe you see yourself as trying to resolve that. Of course, if you're not a physicist, the dream could mean something else entirely.
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That's one dream. The summary says that they're looking at 1 to 4 dreams a night, which indicates that the dreams they're talking about are the ones we don't remember.
That doesn't do anything to explain away the implied criticism. We presumably have dozens of dreams per night that we don't remember, the vast majority of which are neither realistic nor "threat dreams". So what's the purpose of those?
I don't think there's a scientist anywhere that thinks some dreams serve one purpose and other dreams serve another. Dreaming in general probably serves more than one purpose simultaneously, but every dream serves those same purposes... whether it's defragmenting memories, or cataloging fantasies, or whatever. REM sleep is REM sleep; there are no different "categories" of REM sleep. And clearly, most of our dreams have nothing whatsoever to do with preparing us for threats. Simply using anecdotal quotes about people saying "it was like a dream!" when they respond to a real life threat situation is hardly proof of anything.
This is one of those cases where a single "false" result precludes a "true" result from the rest of the experiment. And we've all got plenty of "false" results every night.
Dreams where I'm naked are awesome due to my total hotness.
what's that now?
So what sense does it make to say that a behavior or phenomenon produced by evolution has a "purpose"? I think "the purpose of X is Y" is verbal shorthand for saying "Y is an effect of X, which accrues some net reproductive benefit". In that interpretation, a single "false" result is not sufficient. Some dreams don't do their "job". But as long as enough of them do, and you live incrementally longer and have more long-lived children as a result, then the dreams will have fulfilled their evolutionary "purpose".
That's not to say that this work has some outstanding merit. Under this interpretation, to claim that something has a particular evolutionary purpose is a pretty weak statement.
It sounds as if you think of human beings a fundamentally mysterious, outside the bounds of science. How can science possibly strip us of our humanity? All it does is provide an explanation of what humanity actually means. If that actuality is not what you romanticized humanity to be, I can see how that might be disillusioning, but science can't strip anything of something it actually has. All it can strip away is what people falsely think it has.
Reductionist science? What is that? How is this an attempt to convince people their dreams have no worth? What does state approval have to do with anything? Are you really that anti-science?
Do you live within an oppressive environment? I mean, North Korea, say? Do you know what people's dreams are like there? Maybe they have nightmares all the time.
Not that I'm saying that this hypothesis about dreams has any merit. But any kind of mystical or metaphysical hypothesis for dreams has even less merit.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The flaw in your logic is the fact that other animals other then Humans dream, and the process of dreaming puts an animal in physical danger, In a state where there is minimal control to the bodily movement, as well as waking up and potentional short term disoreatation. All this could cause animals to who dream to get eaten by non-dreaming preditors. Giving them a disadvantage over their preditors. Evolutionary science can explain why this exists, not nessarily why we use it the way we normally like to do. Our thumbs were evolved to help us to climb, we now use them to create. Evolution Gave us our thumbs to survive, we as humans use our thumbs to move to the next step. Evolution gave us dreams as a survival mechnism, we use dreaming to inspire and move us to the next step.
Its not an attempt to strip humanity it is an attempt to understand it. Dont let huberious get in the way we are Animals many of our actions as a people and a culture has reasons.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Memory is associative. This implies that remembering a dream while conscious depends on strong associations held by the conscious mind. That's the random part: the dream one happens to remember is the one that has more in common with one's conscious personality. If you think you're not good at fighting, you'll probably remember the dreams where you didn't do so well in a fight. Conversely, when an actual fight situation comes up, you're more likely to do poorly if your conscious mind is engaged. Compare and contrast to reflexive reactions, where you "don't have time" to think.
TFA suggests that it is possible to have dreams which train your subconscious by association. Given that you aren't conscious of every mental process, it's not hard to imagine that your mind can train itself without conscious knowledge. I think it's roughly analogous to code that runs faster without debugging turned on: If you could be conscious of even *some* of your background mental processes, they'd be slowed down--and you'd be spending lots of your awake time just to watch, let alone interpret the debugging output.
Our brains work without our consciousness--and given training, they do far better without our consciousness. Consider the pianist playing Flight of the Bumblebee flawlessly, who suddenly becomes conscious of his/her fingers. For a more common activity, who among us can do that cool pencil-spinning trick, and who can't--or remembers trying to learn it?. Mistakes are far more likely with the conscious mind engaged. The purpose of training is to optimize the loop by removing the conscious mind.
What's weird about the idea under discussion is that it describes training initiated without the conscious mind. This form of training likely has its origins in the lower life forms which perform complex tasks that seem to transcend simple ROM, e.g., wasps.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
Your analogy doesn't work. People who are born deaf are born with a missing part of the ear or the brain that processes auditory information. People who become deaf usually are deaf for a reason that we know about. In the latter case, action and result are directly observable.
Nobody is genetically or otherwise hardwired to dream everything bu tthis one type of dream. And there's nothing to show that "threat simulation" is a near guaranteed result of a particular past event. Dreams vary per night. The same people can dream one way, another way, then the first way again, and "threat simulation" does not do anything to explain this. It barely explains that particular "category" of dream, if we can even categorize dreams as such.
Besides, when I fail to get REM sleep (lots of 2-hour power naps instead of one continuous 8/9-hour sleep), I respond poorly too, because I'm tired. Maybe, just maybe, these rats were tired too.
So while one counterexample might not imply a hypothesis to be wrong, there never was evidence of correlation anyway. It was only just speculation to begin with, and poor speculation at that.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
What a shame that the 'experts' had to torture innocent rats to come up with their hypothesis. I would have thought they could have worked out whether their hypothesis was possible by common sense.
Rats' dreams are no doubt similar to our own, which is why torturing them and using them as 'things' is wrong...