Why do we dream? - Amy Adkins
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In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. In the years since, we haven't paused in our quest to understand why we dream. And while we still don’t have any definitive answers, we have some theories. Amy Adkins reveals the top seven reasons why we might dream.
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David Drascic
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lesson in progress
Dreams probably serve many different functions
I think many of the theories are relevant and at least partly true. Even Freud is relevant, with his idea that whatever obsesses our unconscious will affect how we confabulate the stories we remember of our dreams. Our evolved brains include many ancient structures and functions. Most creatures sleep, and most of those with sufficiently developed brains dream. It would be an error to assume that whatever roles dreams played in our ancestors' brains were no longer relevant, at least not without compelling reason to assume those functions were somehow lost or transformed by evolution.
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vania sofia chacon paredes
Lesson completed
in response to David Drascic Show comment
Yes, they help in many functions
Olga Aurora Hernandez De La Torre
Olga Aurora Hernandez De La Torre
Lesson completed
in response to David Drascic Show comment
I think that sometimes try to tell you something your brain
David Drascic
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lesson in progress
in response to David Drascic Show comment
But there are other dreams that seem completely random.
Consider the new insights into trained perception being a function which predicts expected inputs using trained Bayesian models, filtered and recalculated using relatively low bitrate sensory input, which makes our perception of reality a "controlled hallucination". We use the same parts of our brain to understand speech as we do when we speak. Those production or action functions (ie outputs) work just as hard processing inputs.
One function of our Type I (automatic, unconscious) thinking is understanding what is going on. We need a narrative of what we are experiencing in order to predict what will happen next. When presented with random inputs, this mechanism will automatically confabulate a story to connect those elements. When we dream random, activation dreams, the confabulator builds snippets of stories around them. Which is why dreams often have a different kind of “logic”.
David Drascic
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lesson in progress
Pet owners know that their pets dream of hunting. We all have experience with rehearsal type dreaming, and with stress and emotional processing dreams too. Even nightmares can be seen as a way for our brains to rehearse the fight and flight responses.
