Kenneth Phillips
COMPUTER_SCIENCE
COMPUTER_SCIENCE_189_PAPER
However, since animal dreaming can be only inferred, not confirmed, animal studies yield
no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of [Link] human subjects with
brain lesions can provide clues, but the lesion method cannot discriminate between the
effects of destruction and disconnection and cannot target specific neuronal groups in
heterogeneous regions like the brain stem.== Generation ==
Denied precision tools and obliged to depend on imaging, much dream research has
succumbed to the law of the [Link] detect an increase of blood flow in a specific
brain region and then credit that region with a role in generating [Link] pooling study
results has led to the newer conclusion that dreaming involves large numbers of regions
and pathways, which likely are different for different dream [Link] creation in the
brain involves significant neural activity downstream from eye intake, and it is theorized
that "the visual imagery of dreams is produced by activation during sleep of the same
structures that generate complex visual imagery in waking perception."Dreams present a
running narrative rather than exclusively visual [Link] their work with split-
brain subjects, Gazzaniga and LeDoux postulated, without attempting to specify the neural
mechanisms, a "left-brain interpreter" that seeks to create a plausible narrative from
whatever electro-chemical signals reach the brain's left [Link] research has
determined that some brain regions fully active during waking are, during REM sleep,
activated only in a partial or fragmentary [Link] on this knowledge, textbook author
James W. Kalat explains, "[A] dream represents the brain's effort to make sense of sparse
and distorted information....The cortex combines this haphazard input with whatever other
activity was already occurring and does its best to synthesize a story that makes sense of
the information."Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas is even more blunt, calling often bizarre
dream content "just the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random
neural signaling."== Theories on function ==
For many humans across multiple eras and cultures, dreams are believed to have
functioned as revealers of truths sourced during sleep from gods or other external
[Link] Egyptians believed that dreams were the best way to receive divine
revelation, and thus they would induce (or "incubate") [Link] went to sanctuaries
and slept on special "dream beds" in hope of receiving advice, comfort, or healing from the
[Link] a Darwinian perspective dreams would have to fulfill some kind of biological
requirement, provide some benefit for natural selection to take place, or at least have no
negative impact on [Link] (1886), a physician from Hamburg, was the first who
suggested that dreams are a need and that they have the function to erase (a) sensory
impressions that were not fully worked up, and (b) ideas that were not fully developed
during the [Link] dreams, incomplete material is either removed (suppressed) or deepened
and included into [Link], whose dream studies focused on interpreting dreams, not
explaining how or why humans dream, disputed Robert's hypothesis and proposed that
dreams preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled those wishes that otherwise would
awaken the [Link] wrote that dreams "serve the purpose of prolonging sleep
instead of waking [Link] are the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers."A turning
point in theorizing about dream function came in 1953, when Science published the
Aserinsky and Kleitman paper establishing REM sleep as a distinct phase of sleep and
linking dreams to REM [Link] and even after publication of the Solms 2000 paper that
certified the separability of REM sleep and dream phenomena, many studies purporting to
uncover the function of dreams have in fact been studying not dreams but measurable REM
[Link] of dream function since the identification of REM sleep include:
Hobson's and McCarley's 1977 activation-synthesis hypothesis, which proposed "a
functional role for dreaming sleep in promoting some aspect of the learning process...." In
2010 a Harvard study was published showing experimental evidence that dreams were
correlated with improved [Link]'s and Mitchison's 1983 "reverse learning" theory,
which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are
offline, removing (suppressing) parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during
[Link]'s 1995 proposal that dreams serve a "quasi-therapeutic" function, enabling
the dreamer to process trauma in a safe [Link]'s 2000 threat simulation
hypothesis, whose premise is that during much of human evolution, physical and
interpersonal threats were serious, giving reproductive advantage to those who survived
[Link] aided survival by replicating these threats and providing the dreamer with
practice in dealing with [Link] 2015, Revonsuo proposed social simulation theory, which
describes dreams as a simulation for training social skills and [Link]'s and
Vaughn's 2021 defensive activation theory, which says that, given the brain's
neuroplasticity, dreams evolved as a visual hallucinatory activity during sleep's extended
periods of darkness, busying the occipital lobe and thereby protecting it from possible
appropriation by other, non-vision, sense [Link] Hoel proposes, based on artificial
neural networks, that dreams prevent overfitting to past experiences; that is, they enable
the dreamer to learn from novel situations.== Religious and other cultural contexts ==
Dreams figure prominently in major world [Link] dream experience for early
humans, according to one interpretation, gave rise to the notion of a human "soul," a central
element in much religious thought.