Word: revonsuo
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...dreaming must serve important functions because they're vulnerable states and natural selection would have eliminated them if they didn't provide compensating benefits. In the ancestral environment, human life was short and perilous; ever-lurking predators threatened survival and reproductive success. The biological function of dreaming, argues Antti Revonsuo, professor of psychology at the University of Turku, Finland, is to simulate threatening events so to prepare the dreamer for recognizing and avoiding danger...
...threat-simulation theory, first presented in 2000, "is built on the actual empirical evidence we have concerning the content of dreams," Revonsuo says. "It's surprising how many theories of dreaming there are that are not based on any systematic review of the evidence." He cites studies showing that, typically, dreams are too seldom sweet, and that negative feelings, dangerous scenarios and aggression are over-represented. Based on ongoing work with PhD student Katja Valli, Revonsuo estimates that the average "non-traumatized" young adult has, conservatively, 300 threat-simulation dreams a year. In the dreams of both men and women...
...dreams are biased toward simulating ancestral threats, the traces of these biases would be strongest early in life, before the brain has adjusted to the realities of the contemporary environment. Sure enough, Revonsuo says, research shows that animals make up about 30% of all characters in the dreams of children aged 2-6 compared to 5% of adults'. True, the animals of children's dreams are often fluffy and harmless, but almost half the time they're frightening creatures-snakes, bears, lions, gorillas-that children would seldom, if ever, have encountered in waking life...
...reason we don't dream about reading and writing, Revonsuo speculates in his original paper, is not because these activities don't engage our emotions but because they're "cultural latecomers that have [yet] to be effortlessly hammered into our evolved cognitive architecture." Revonsuo knows that his theory pleases neither Freudians nor neuroscientists. "If, for the supporters of the psychological theories, it grants too little meaning to dreams," he says, "for the supporters of neurophysiological random-noise theories, it grants dreaming far too much...
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