Last month, a paper was published by a man named Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and sleep researcher at Harvard. He believes dreaming that occurs when there is rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep is physiological. The brain is preparing the body with sights, sounds, and emotions of waking. Dr. Hobson is arguing that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness. Dr. Rodolfo Llinas, neurologist and physiologist at New York University disagrees with this statement. He proposed that the act of dreaming is consciousness itself, but without senses. Then, when people are awake the brain fills in the sight, touch and hearing for that dream. All the ideas about dreaming are partly based on the findings about REM sleep. Evidence has been found that REM activity helps the brain make connections, particularly in visual areas. This article goes on to talk about different studies that have been done to try to obtain a better understanding of dreams.
Learning more about dreams is important because it helps scientists learn more about the way the brain works. This article showed the different theories about why humans dream. It explained that studies have done, but scientists still do not have a definite purpose of why the brain has dreams.
I think that this article has a lot of detail and is very interesting. Some parts of it were confusing because the explanations of each theory could have been written in a more understandable way. In this article they could have also done a better job of explaining what REM is. I would have enjoyed learning more about other proposals of why humans dream. Overall, I was pleased with the amount of information that I was able to learn from this article.
Carey, Benedict. "A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain." New York Times 9 Nov. 2009. Web. 11 Nov. 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html?ref=science
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