The Meaning of Dreams
- Created by: emily_w
- Created on: 22-01-15 10:40
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- What is the purpose of dreams?
- They are a by-product of the brain's debugging system
- Crick and Mitchinson
- The brain is like a computer, and at night it sorts information acquired in the day.
- To remain compact and efficient, the brain deletes unwanted 'files'
- memories
- neural connections
- The brain is active while it debugs. The activity is experienced as dreams
- They are wish fulfilment
- Freud
- Purpose
- Freud believed dreams to be a manifestation of the id's unacceptable desires
- Dreams are difficult to interpret and Freud thought this was because the id's content could be disturbing, so it expresses itself symbolically
- The id's impulses have to be released somehow
- The impulses are known as latent content
- The way the id expresses itself is known as manifest content
- Dreamwork
- This is the means by which the id's desires are manifested into dreams. There are four aspects
- Condensation: Many ideas are condensed into one
- Displacement: Latent content is replaced with symbols
- Considerations of representability: Thoughts are transferred into images
- Secondary revision: Turns the results of the dreamwork, which are distorted, into something which akes sense
- Considerations of representability: Thoughts are transferred into images
- Displacement: Latent content is replaced with symbols
- Displacement: Latent content is replaced with symbols
- Considerations of representability: Thoughts are transferred into images
- Secondary revision: Turns the results of the dreamwork, which are distorted, into something which akes sense
- Considerations of representability: Thoughts are transferred into images
- Dreamwork is necessary because the unacceptable thoughts must be transferred into something non-threatening so the person won't wake up
- Symbols
- The id's content can be disturbing, so it is represented with symbols
- They are for problem solving
- Rosalind Cartwright, 2006
- Cartwright said dreams allow people to experiment with possible solutions to a problem
- Procedure
- 20 depressed and 10 control participants. All were going through a divorce
- Gave them a test about their current concerns on three nights. Sleep was interrupted during REM so they could relate their dreams
- Results
- When the participants were concerned about their divorce, partner appeared in the dream.
- As depressed participants started to feel more positive, their dreams about their partner were less negative
- Conclusion
- Dreaming allowed the participants to work through their concerns about the divorce and stopped their depression
- They are a by-product of random neural activity
- Hobson and McCarley
- They said during REM sleep, neurons in the brain stem activate randomly
- The frontal cortex synthesises (tries to make sense of) these impulses
- Dreams are weird because the brain is trying to make sense of random neural activity
- They are a by-product of the brain's debugging system
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