Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [OT] Encounters with fate, consequence, destiny and general weird stuff.
Lizard said:
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a)The purpose of dreaming is to sort and categorize experiences, attempting to find matches and place them properly. (This is why you have so many odd juxtapositions in dreams; the mind is basically trying out combinations to see if they fit, and tossing away those which don't.)
Again, you're reading psych and thinking it has anything to do with how the brain actually works. Actually, dreams are the short term memory areas of the brain firing repeatedly to "teach" what they contain to long term memory. It's sort of a upload, except it has to repeat itself a
lot because the computer it's uploading to is slow on the uptake. This is one of the many reasons college students should get a lot more REM sleep than they do. Long term memory needs
lots of repetition to record something. So we've evolved dreaming as a way to speed up the process.
In one rat study, they monitored the spatial map in the hippocampus (short term memory area) of a rat who they repeatedly ran through the same maze. Different parts of the map came to represent precise locations in the maze. i.e. cell c14 always fires when the rat is in the northwest corner. Cells d15 7 q35 always fire when the rat is 4 inches south of the northeast corner. etc. When the rat went to sleep and began dreaming, the map would start firing in the
exact same order it did when the rat ran the maze. Repeatedly. Studies are on-going regarding the exact behavior of motor and somatosensory cortex during this.
As all of your recent experiences are repeatedly fired across your cortex, associations are made and various "experiences" are attached to the information. This is NOT a random juxtaposition process. The cortex is laid out as a series of very elaborate maps. Information will be routed to
similarly mapped information which is where the dream itself comes from. If, in your short term memory, there is a lot of reference to a specific problem in your life, that will manifest in your dreams, because of the repetition. It will be disguised by whatever referential experiences your cortex comes up with to throw at you. But where do you think literary symbolism came from? Same thing applies here. If you've spent the day trying how to figure out a problem, salient facts about the problem are going to be running through your cortex as you dream. If the problem involves say, a domineering woman, your mind might latch onto your psychotic aunt because she's a good reference for that kind of behavior with all kinds of memories available of her being domineering. You'll therefore dream about the aunt you haven't seen or thought about in years and wake up thinking, "What was that about? So random."
Randomness in the brain stops after initial axon growth during development, if it truly exists even then, which is debatable.
As a neurobiologist, you might know more about this: I recently read of a study which showed that people likely to believe conspiracy theories were also more likely to see patterns in randomly generated images. It appears to be a linked to an excess of a specific neurotransmitter. Do you have any links to this?
Haven't heard of it, but I'm a cellular and molecular physiology/anatomy guy, so I tend to avoid that kind of thing (too fluffy, not crunchy enough for me
). Out of curiosity I ran a
pubmed search on Rorschach and neurotransmitter. I did find out that there's a suspected link between schizophrenia and catecholaminergic neurotransmitters, which they've based partially on differential responses to Rorschach blots by model neural networks. But nothing related to what you mentioned. I don't have access to psych journals here, as the university has blocked access to the electronic library pages from some outside servers (including RoadRunner) because of security issues. If you still have the article you read, that might help me track down the ultimate source of the research. A name would help tremendously.
