Astonishing Science Facts

[C C]

Makes you wonder how profoundly deaf people grow up (as far as I know) pretty 'normal' despite having no verbs to verbalise with.

Temple Grandin is autistic and thinks in pictures rather than words. She believes animals are the same way. But since she has to convert pictures into words in order to talk or write, I once thought that she surely has an inner voice or narrator, too, even if it's not dominant.

But some individuals do have anendophasia (no ability to generate and experience private sounds), and yet they still communicate verbally. If an autistic person also had total aphantasia, I don't know how they would get by -- think like Helen Keller?

NOTE: Grandin has since learned and acknowledged that not all autistic people are like her. "Normal brains tend to ignore the details, while people on the autism spectrum tend to focus on the details instead of larger concepts. [...] After talking to hundreds of families and individuals with autism or Asperger's, I have observed that there are actually different types of specialized brains. All people on the spectrum think in details, but there are three basic categories of specialized brains."

TEMPLE GRANDIN
https://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html
https://www.grandin.com/references/think...imals.html

EXCERPTS: A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think." People with autism and animals both think by making visual associations. These associations are like snapshots of events and tend to be very specific. For example, a horse might fear bearded men when it sees one in the barn, but bearded men might be tolerated in the riding arena. In this situation the horse may only fear bearded men in the barn because he may have had a bad past experience in the barn with a bearded man.

[...] I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.

[...] Autistics have problems learning things that cannot be thought about in pictures. The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules. Lower-functioning children often learn better by association, with the aid of word labels attached to objects in their environment. Some very impaired autistic children learn more easily if words are spelled out with plastic letters they can feel.

[Magical Realist]

You mean the Psychology Today article? @_@
Who's reacting mindlessly now?

That was just cherry-picked for God knows what reason by the mindless LLM.

We have repeated dreams because we have repeated thoughts and experiences in waking life. And current experiences can and do often remind us of the past or trigger a subconscious correlation to past experience. Nothing mystical about any of that. In animals, it could even just come down to similar neural pathways being activated.

Saying dreams are just random synaptic housecleaning doesn't match what we experience in dreams. There is highly detailed plot structure, recurrence of places and situations and plots and even characters that have no real world counterpart, the surfacing of repressed issues like sex and fear of being tested in school or not being adequately dressed and of traumatic experiences from the past. For example one very common theme in my dreams is of forgetting where I parked a truck I owned years ago, which in real life was stolen while parked at my apts. That's an indication of the traumatic scarring that that event had on me. Things like this show obvious content-based structure and meaning that can't be reduced to a neurological interpretation of meaningless synaptic firings.

Whatever you may wish to believe about human dreams is a far cry from presuming it's similar in animals.

I know animals are conscious because I myself am conscious and observe correlations in their behavior with my own. I also know animals dream because I myself dream and experience it as a conscious being, just as animals do. You're simply trying to dismiss animal dreaming as some sort of non-conscious process. Clearly it is not as a "non-conscious dream" is a contradiction in terms.

[Syne]

You mean the Psychology Today article? @_@
Who's reacting mindlessly now?

That was just cherry-picked for God knows what reason by the mindless LLM.

No, I picked it, because it made my point. Gemini doesn't supply quotes from citations. It summarizes and gives links, if you want to know more.
But I found that article through a old-fashioned search.

Care to make any other stupid assumptions?

We have repeated dreams because we have repeated thoughts and experiences in waking life. And current experiences can and do often remind us of the past or trigger a subconscious correlation to past experience. Nothing mystical about any of that. In animals, it could even just come down to similar neural pathways being activated.

Saying dreams are just random synaptic housecleaning doesn't match what we experience in dreams.

I didn't say that. Note the "in animals" part.

There is highly detailed plot structure, recurrence of places and situations and plots and even characters that have no real world counterpart, the surfacing of repressed issues like sex and fear of being tested in school or not being adequately dressed and of traumatic experiences from the past. For example one very common theme in my dreams is of forgetting where I parked a truck I owned years ago, which in real life was stolen while parked at my apts. That's an indication of the traumatic scarring that that event had on me. Things like this show obvious content-based structure and meaning that can't be reduced to a neurological interpretation of meaningless synaptic firings.

Yes, because you are human:

We have repeated dreams because we have repeated thoughts and experiences in waking life. And current experiences can and do often remind us of the past or trigger a subconscious correlation to past experience.

Whatever you may wish to believe about human dreams is a far cry from presuming it's similar in animals.

I know animals are conscious because I myself am conscious and observe correlations in their behavior with my own. I also know animals dream because I myself dream and experience it as a conscious being, just as animals do. You're simply trying to dismiss animal dreaming as some sort of non-conscious process. Clearly it is not as a "non-conscious dream" is a contradiction in terms.

Anthropomorphism. 9_9
You didn't originally claim that animals were merely conscious. You said their dreams meant they have a soul. I see you're backpedaling now. When I already said:

Who said animals don't have experiences while dreaming? Dogs, for example, obviously try to chase and bark at dream squirrels, just like they would awake. It's just a mimicry of waking life, which for animals doesn't include human-like contemplation.

So I clearly agree that animal have experiences while dreaming. Just not as humans do.

[Magical Realist]

Saying dreams are just random synaptic housecleaning doesn't match what we experience in dreams.

I didn't say that. Note the "in animals" part.

You posted the theory of it yourself as an explanation for dreaming period. That would include dreaming in all species:

Many neuroscientists suggest that dreaming helps the brain "unlearn" or purge the clutter of useless daily memories and emotional baggage.

The primary theories on what dreams accomplish include:

Memory Purging (Reverse Learning): The theory pioneered by Nobel laureate Francis Crick suggests that REM sleep is the brain's way of doing "neural housecleaning". Dreams are the conscious byproducts of the brain deleting unneeded connections and random daily data to prevent overload.

Yes, because you are human

So you are backpedaling now and saying dreams can be messages from our unconscious but only in humans. Why wouldn't the same be true for animals? Are they not conscious? Are they not capable of learning?

Anthropomorphism. 9_9

You didn't know humans are animals too? lol

You didn't originally claim that animals were merely conscious. You said their dreams meant they have a soul. I see you're backpedaling now. When I already said

So what? They ARE conscious and their dreams indicate they have a soul. Do you even know what a soul is?

So I clearly agree that animal have experiences while dreaming. Just not as humans do.

Unless they're autistic as CC's post makes clear. Animals apparently dream thru visual associations instead of linguistic associations just as autistic humans do. It's a kind of sense-making experience and possibly learning going on by the processing of the day's experiences.

[Syne]

Saying dreams are just random synaptic housecleaning doesn't match what we experience in dreams.

I didn't say that. Note the "in animals" part.

You posted the theory of it yourself as an explanation for dreaming period. That would include dreaming in all species:

Many neuroscientists suggest that dreaming helps the brain "unlearn" or purge the clutter of useless daily memories and emotional baggage.

The primary theories on what dreams accomplish include:

Memory Purging (Reverse Learning): The theory pioneered by Nobel laureate Francis Crick suggests that REM sleep is the brain's way of doing "neural housecleaning". Dreams are the conscious byproducts of the brain deleting unneeded connections and random daily data to prevent overload.

Yes, because you are human

So you are backpedaling now and saying dreams can be messages from our unconscious but only in humans. Why wouldn't the same be true for animals? Are they not conscious? Are they not capable of learning?

Anthropomorphism. 9_9

You didn't know humans are animals too? lol

You didn't originally claim that animals were merely conscious. You said their dreams meant they have a soul. I see you're backpedaling now. When I already said

So what? They ARE conscious and their dreams indicate they have a soul. Do you even know what a soul is?

So I clearly agree that animal have experiences while dreaming. Just not as humans do.

Unless they're autistic as CC's post makes clear. Animals apparently dream thru visual associations instead of linguistic associations just as autistic humans do. It's a kind of sense-making experience and possibly learning going on by the processing of the day's experiences.

Sundowning again?
Or just too lazy to format quotes?

I'm tired of coddling your piss-poor reading comprehension.
Go ahead and give yourself a little ego boost and falsely claim you've proven me wrong. Hope it helps.

[Magical Realist]

In my own experience one dream can actually change your life. When I was living in Austin in the 80's and heavily into Jung, one night I had a nightmare of a young girl being raped and torn apart by hoodlums in a park. I woke up so distressed and depressed I didn't go to work that day, which was for the uniform rental company Cintas. I never returned. That one dream showed me the terrible amount of anxiety and dread I had repressed doing the kind of work I was doing. It literally was tearing me apart though I refused to acknowledge it. Thus it is that the psyche sometimes sends you a message--indeed, a red alert!--that it's time to change your course in life.

[Magical Realist]

"Redwoods can drink around 160 gallons (605 liters) of water per day. In the dry summer months, the trees get water from the iconic fog that blankets the forest. Redwoods get up to 40% of their water from the fog each year!"---- https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/fog-red...limate.htm

[Syne]

In my own experience one dream can actually change your life. When I was living in Austin in the 80's and heavily into Jung, one night I had a nightmare of a young girl being raped and torn apart by hoodlums in a park. I woke up so distressed and depressed I didn't go to work that day, which was for the uniform rental company Cintas. I never returned. That one dream showed me the terrible amount of anxiety and dread I had repressed doing the kind of work I was doing. It literally was tearing me apart though I refused to acknowledge it. Thus it is that the psyche sometimes sends you a message--indeed, a red alert!--that it's time to change your course in life.

Thankfully, not many men dream of being as useless.

[Magical Realist]

Aside from just being your usual attempt to crap on my personal stories for no reason whatsoever, what do you mean by this? I joined the military about a year later.