Do you Know...??? Why We Dream...!!!!

Do you Know...??? Why We Dream...!!!! 

Why We Dream ?

If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, as Freud claimed, then that route may be a highway full of tortuous twists and turns—leading nowhere. But it affords some spectacular vistas along the way.

By turns, dreams have been deemed prophecies of the future, full of meaning—if only someone could figure out what it is—or the effluence of nerve cells randomly unwinding from a busy day. Once considered a hallmark of the periodic surges of brain activity known as rapid-eye-movement sleep, dreaming now seems somewhat less bundled up; at least 25 percent of dreams are scattered through other parts of the night. Dreaming has been seen as critical for learning, or at least important for solving problems—or as nice but unnecessary. It's an emblem of mental illness—or a safety shield deflecting it.

The newest switchback on dreams comes from South African neuroscientist Mark Solms. Maybe, says Solms, we've been confusing cause and effect. Dreams, he suggests, are not a by-product of sleep, as has been assumed all along. Dreaming may be what allows us to sleep in the first place.

"Dreams protect sleep," Solms says. They furnish an ersatz world to keep the brain temporarily occupied in its unyielding quest for activity. His iconoclastic view of dreams springs from emerging evidence that REM sleep and dreaming are not synonymous, and that the brain mechanisms involved in REM sleep may be entirely different from those involved in dreaming. Dreaming, in fact, is now thought to recruit areas of the brain involved in higher mental functions.

In other words, dreaming does for the brain what Saturday-morning cartoons do for the kids: It keeps them sufficiently entertained so that the serious players in the household can get needed recovery time. Without such diversion, the brain would be urging us up and out into the world to keep it fully engaged.

"Dreams are a delusional hallucinatory state" driven by activation of the brain's basic motivational system, Solms told a gathering of scientists in New York City. And like delusions, they appear to be stoked by an abundance of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Dopa mine, scientists now know, plays a critical role in directing our attention. The petrochemical decrees what is salient in our environment, regardless of whether that environment is inside us or outside. Under dopa mine's influence, events or thoughts jump out of the background, grab our attention, move us to act and drive goal-directed behavior.

Dreams trick us into thinking we're out striving in the wider world. "The fundamental problem of being alive is that we must get all our needs met in the outside world," says Sol-ms. The brain has an answer to that; it has developed a kind of unified motivational force variously called the "seeking" or "wanting" system, an orchestration of primitive and higher neural structures that orients us to the outside world with an air of anticipation and positive expectancy. As Solms puts it, "It's an all-purpose looking-for-pleasure-in-the-world drive" that sends animals out to satisfy their needs.

Pioneering neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes the seeking system as a "goad without a goal" (goals, such as gathering food, being dictated by the specific situation). It is a readiness for action, an appetitive arousal, the neurobiological descendant of Freud's idea of libido. Representing a very basic function of the brain, it commands and activates an array of neural circuits.

Researchers mapping the functions of the brain have shown that the hallucinations of psychosis involve hyperactivation of the seeking system's structures. They also involve dysregulated dopamine transmission. Increasingly viewed as "the wind of the psychotic fire," dopamine prompts the brain to assign abnormal importance to its own internal representations. Delusions, in other words, are errors of salience attribution. We overvalue our own thoughts, which are mistaken for perceptual experience of the world.

Dreams share many qualities with hallucinations. They are the hallucinations we all experience. Both dreams and hallucinations involve intensive activation of the seeking system. And Solms points to accumulating evidence that dreaming, like hallucinating, is driven by dopamine.

French neuroscientist Claude Gottesmann reported that dopamine release in the brain's nucleus accumbens, a site long recognized to be involved in the hallucinations of schizophrenia, is maximal during dream sleep. "Dreaming and schizophrenia have the same neurochemical background," Gottesmann says.

Other studies show that the dopamine-boosting drug L-dopa, commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease, prompts people to have more dreams, more emotional content to their dreams and more bizarre dreams.

Driven by dopamine, dreams fill our minds with myriad stimuli that feel worthy of our attention, says Solms. "That's necessary because the body is withdrawn from the external world."

Goaded into seeking but blocked from action by paralyzing neurochemicals released during dream sleep, we feed on our own internal representations of the world. And we wake hungry for new experiences that build our psychic cinema of internal representations.

Says Solms, "The dopamine hypothesis is at the core of why we dream."

Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal visions. In fact, according to a new study in theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries — India, South Korea and the United States — believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.

According to the study, 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans hold an old-fashioned Freudian view of dreams: that they are portals into the unconscious. 

But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but observable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isn't mystical but — for the most part — highly predictable.

The authors of the study — psychologists Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard — offer a few theories. For one, dreams often feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss them outright. Also, because we can't trace the content of dreams to an external source — because that content seems to arise spontaneously and from within — we can't explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, "Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I'm just remembering that episode." But people have a harder time making sense of dreams. Maybe 24 caused the dream, we think — or maybe we're having a premonition of an attack. We love to interpret dreams widely, and those acts of interpretation give dreams meaning. 

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 they guessed, a researcher spun a wheel of fortune in front of them that landed on a random number between 0 and 100. People tended to pick an answer that wasn't far from the number on the wheel, even though the wheel had nothing to do with African countries.

Countless experiments over the ensuing decades have confirmed that most of us make this so-called anchoring mistake — that is, making a decision based largely on an unrelated piece of information, like a random number that appears on a wheel. Anchoring occurs all the time, like when you're asked to look at your Social Security number before answering a question (you're more likely to pick an answer close to the digits in your SSN). A team of researchers even 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.)

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: optimistic thinking.