What are dreams for
This article is amediareview of the New Yorker article I read 2023-09-17. For my take on the question see… well, nowhere, bc I don’t have a page for it yet, womp womp. Backlink: Musings on everything else
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-are-dreams-for
Neat factoids:
- Modern science suggests that body twitches are not triggered by the brain and received by the body but the reverse: we twitch as a calibration mechanism by which our brain can better sense the body.
- Supporting evidence: rat pups whose eyes aren’t developed enough to have never seen anything still twitch their eyes
- Also, electrical impulses in the brain occur after body twitches.
- People with schizophrenia are capable of tickling themselves because they cannot distinguish self from other.
- Dreamers are the same way; if you wake someone during REM sleep, they too can tickle themselves as they come awake, presumably because they can’t distinguish self from other.
- REM sleepers can’t (easily) have their dreams influenced (the article doesn’t really elaborate on this)
- But tests were run on sleepers where they’re exposed to scents and even sights — they pull their eyes open — and the sleepers’ dreams didn’t react accordingly