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Are dreams predictions?

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/how-dreams-predic...f-the-past

EXCERPT: . . . What has all this got to do with dreaming?

While awake, we are good at spotting logical, deterministic patterns. We tend to suppose that we need to be awake to function, but this is not the case. In every 24-hour period, there is another state when our brains are just as active, some researchers think more active. This state is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when most dreams occur. During REM, we are better at spotting the less obvious or ‘remote’ associations that predict probabilistic events.

Several experimental studies demonstrate this. In 1999, Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues demonstrated that after being woken from REM sleep you make more remote associations than you would if you had been awake for some time. For example, when prompted with a word such as ‘hot’, study participants were more likely to respond with ‘sun’, whereas the fully awake brain generally elicited the word ‘cold’ – a more obvious association, like night-and-day.

In 2009, Denise Cai, a psychologist at the University of California, and colleagues administered tests in which words appeared to be unrelated. Consider a word sequence such as ‘falling’, ‘actor’, and ‘dust’. Those with more REM are better able to come up with the word that links all of them: ‘star’.

In a study published in 2015, Murray Barsky, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues looked at probabilistic associations in more depth. They had their participants predict one of two probabilities – ‘sun’ or ‘rain’ – based on descriptions of associated events. They then compared the performance of participants who took a nap containing REM sleep with those who stayed awake, finding that REM subjects routinely had better scores.

Based on all this, I argue that we are better at making non-obvious word-based associations after REM sleep because our brains are primed during that sleep – by our dreams – to spot non-obvious, probabilistic patterns of experience and events. This means that if someone wanted to predict whether I would be at the university on any particular day, they would have a higher chance of success soon after having a dream... (MORE - missing details)
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