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Human beings are irrational about dreams the same way they are irrational about a lot of things. We make dumb choices all the time on the basis of silly information like racial bias or a misunderstanding of statistics - or dreams. Morewedge and Norton quote one of the most famous modern studies to demonstrate our collective folly, from a paper written by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that was published in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky and Kahneman discuss an experiment in which subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries represented in the U.N. Before...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think | 2/25/2009 | See Source »

...showed in a 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that people will endure more physical discomfort (exposure to an unpleasant noise) for less monetary compensation in a lab setting when they are anchored prior to the experiments to smaller monetary amounts. As I said, we all make dumb choices based on silly information. That's why we invest meaning in dreams. (See TIME's 2004 cover on the science of sleep...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think | 2/25/2009 | See Source »

That being said, dumb choices aren't necessarily bad ones. A final finding from the study: When people have dreams about good things happening to their good friends, they are more likely to say those dreams are meaningful than when they have dreams about bad things happening to their friends. Similarly, we invest more meaning in dreams in which our enemies are punished and less meaning in dreams in which our enemies emerge victorious. In short, our interpretation of dreams may say a lot less about some quixotic search for hidden truth than it does about another enduring human quality...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think | 2/25/2009 | See Source »

...mourning thing, I just don’t think I can keep it up any longer.I bet I would’ve said all that. Except right then Daddy had to say, “It only took a few days of knowing your mother before I was dumb with caring. We weren’t even courting and I was sick for her.”Now I sure as shooting couldn’t tell him about Trent. My eyes were shut too tight. ‘Cause all I could see was Mama, back at that store...

Author: By Nathan D. Johnson, CONTRIBUTING WRITER | Title: Featured Fiction | 2/20/2009 | See Source »

Indeed, it is only a matter of time before combat pilots, like biplanes, become obsolete. Tail-mounted GPS kits have given even dumb bombs amazing accuracy once they are pushed out the door of a lumbering cargo plane. Missiles launched from ships or subs have further minimized the need for penetrating warplanes. Meanwhile, much of the Raptor's sky-high price--and that of accompanying jammer planes and rescue helicopters--is driven by the need to get the pilot into harm's way and then safely out. Even worse, while the Air Force wants more fighters from a bygone...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Can Robert Gates Tame the Pentagon? | 2/12/2009 | See Source »

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