http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200710/dreams-night-school?page=3
As I mentioned in class on Monday, I’m very interested on why we dream, so I decided to research the topic. A study done by Antti Revonsuo on rats, showed that rats who were deprived of REM(the part of the sleep cycle in which you dream) sleep were unable to preform basic survival skills. Revonsuo believes this is because dreaming helps one practice for real life danger. A majority of our dreams involve threats that we could come into contact with in everyday life(i.e. car accident, robbery, attack) because they’re setting the stage for us to practice how to function in these situations. However, many researchers believe that dreams do more than help us practice for potential threats. They can also help us learn and solve problems in a creative way. Either way, dreaming doesn’t seem as senseless as it use to.
1 comment:
It's an interesting theory that dreams are for problem solving/dealing with real life threats. To an extent, I could see how this is true. There are however, dreams that are rather strange, not very informative. I've had dreams that I wake up and am just like, what was that? As the researchers admitted, if their theory is true than unfortunately dreams are very inconsistent. I guess it's hard to say though if it is the dreams that are inconsistent in their job to "problem solve" or if problem solving is just one thing that is an unintentional element to dreams. In other words we may draw connections coincidentally based on what we dream about, but that doesn't mean that our dreams were actually there to help us in that way.
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