Thus, a by-product of the dreaming virtual-rehearsal mechanism may be the ability to obtain a higher level of awareness of one's place in regards to one's surroundings. Conversely, a disruption in the normal REM cycle of a developing individual could have negative consequences on the development of mental functions. Thus, it appears advantageous to be able to create vivid representations in the mind's eye of various scenarios, which in fact, is what dreaming entails. Consider disorders in which people physically act out their dreams, and the potential dire consequences that could result from such disorders. Thus far, we have been careful to use qualifiers such as “generally” and “a majority of the time”, when referring to the situated nature of dream cognition because it is possible to have waking-like cognition operate while dreaming (Laberge et al., 1981). Infants raised in environments with rich amounts of information show increased cognitive skills at an earlier age, and this can even extend throughout the lifespan (Diamond, 1988); an enriched environment during the development of the nervous system optimizes its functionality. Abstract: This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processe s. While a theory … Flanagan (2000) raises the potential criticism that dreams do not give us an accurate representation of ourselves and conspecifics, positing that there is no advantage conferred in dreams by rehearsing various social interactions. A. The converse is also true. Before delving into these details on the functional aspects of dreaming, it is necessary to briefly describe more about the phenomenology of dreaming and how this could be reflected in the brain. A more evolutionary explanation for dreaming that has been proposed is that dreams may be a kind of mental threat simulation of potential real-life threatening events, allowing for a kind of safe “dry run”, and the testing and analysis of possible responses and mental schemas. Evolution has favoured a brain that does not heed dreams, and has evolved a mechanism for wiping the scrawl off the mental blackboard, to make room for waking rationality. An example of a disorder where this hypothesis could be investigated is autism. If true, however, the supposedly random information that leads to dreaming would weaken the evolutionary analysis presented here. This data indicates that just as sleep is not a static unitary process, but rather made of discrete stages, the cognitive processes that take place throughout the sleep cycle, and that are normally uniformly called dreams, differ and can result in different classes of dreams (Fosse, Stickgold, Hobson, 2004). It’s just an emergent property of the piecemeal way our brains have evolved, from the older and more automatic systems out to the newer, learning-enabled systems. This is the case because if sleeping and waking cognition are quite different, then rehearsing threatening situations in a dream may not transfer into the ability to better handle similar situations in waking life. This phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming and occurs when the dreamer realizes, within the dream, that they are dreaming and that their actual body is asleep in bed. The nature of the dream-state is highly subjective and a truly personal experience making the scientific analysis of dreaming somewhat prohibitive. If merely imagining an event has the power to better prepare us for an actual event by physically activating comparable brain regions, then it should follow that the more realistic the simulation of events, the more the brain treats the information as real. Due to the variable fitness of particular behaviors at particular times, we need to be adept at interpreting cultural standards when interacting with others. As mentioned above, all evidence points toward the notion that virtual environmental stimuli are treated in essentially the same way as real stimuli from the environment. It's just an emergent property of the piecemeal way our brains have evolved, from the older and more automatic systems out to the newer, learning-enabled systems. Adam Neely video on “Hey Joe” and blues tonality. Flying in a dream, and how effectively or poorly it's done, relates to how much control we feel … Present neuroimaging data suggests that this “non-real” information, or information not tied to any current environmental stimuli, is treated in a similar fashion as information processed in a real physical environment. It has been established that dreaming does occur during REM sleep through the collection of dream reports from subjects awoken from REM sleep, though the same is true for non-REM sleep (NREM; Hobson, 1988). This concept relates to ideas discussed by Kahn, Combs, and Krippner (2002), in terms of stochastic resonance which they contend prevents mental activity from perseverating, which allows for novel situations to be developed through the presence of noise in the system. Ego, as the organizing and controlling centre of our personality, is responsible for creating a balance between the individuals and their environment. From this perspective, it is possible to make a stronger inference that certain physiological mechanisms of REM sleep influence dreaming. This is demonstrated by the PGO waves that occur during REM sleep. And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof? The threat-simulation hypothesis of dreaming argues that this is the purpose of dreams and the reason why dreaming has evolved (Revonsuo, 2000). Thus, evolution selected us to be dreamers. An analysis of dream content suggests that there are systematic differences between REM and NREM dream reports (Hobson, Pace-Schott, Stickgold, 2000). As greater technological advances occur in the field of cognitive neuroscience we should be able to directly test some of the fundamental hypotheses generated in this paper. the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. What is the evolutionary purpose of human dreams? Rather, work by Solms (1997, 2000) points towards the forebrain region as being crucial in the generation of dreams. It is not unreasonable to think that these methods will one day allow for a correlation to be established between certain patterns of brain activity and corresponding dream content, not unlike how current technology now allows accurate prediction of information from subjective experiences. As discussed by Bogdan (1997, p.108), “…key advances in interpretation, such as the recognition of belief, were accelerated by increased opportunities to interact with or manipulate subjects and slowed down by a lack of such opportunities.” As such, via teasing, play, mental rehearsal/imagery, or dreaming, the individual is given the opportunity to utilize successful strategies in dealing with these situations and further develop interpretive skills. Rather than a simple threat rehearsal mechanism, it is argued that dreams reflect a more general virtual rehearsal mechanism that is likely to play an important role in the development of human cognitive capacities. This means that certain higher-order mental processes, which would function to appraise the situation in an intellectual fashion (mostly frontal areas), would likely have to be deactivated, which research indicates is the case (Mazur, Pace-Schott, Hobson, 2002). We propose that the fitness-enhancing benefits of dreaming is not restricted to threat rehearsal, and the evolution of other higher-order cognitive faculties has been strongly influenced by a dreaming mechanism. REM sleep seems to be exclusive to placental and marsupial mammals (Winson, 1993). 73% Upvoted. Also, clearly in our own species, the traits we have which help us deal with social situations vary greatly and under certain circumstances can be beneficial, while at other times potentially put us at risk. One challenge to our hypothesis that deserves mentioning is the fact that we do not always remember our dreams (Freud, 1900). It is well known that children, and even other species, suffer detrimental effects when raised in impoverished environments (Joseph, 1999). This is exactly what is seen, with studies indicating that dream content is biased toward negative elements reflecting threat, as opposed to positive elements. However, evidence from lucid dream studies (described below) indicate that tasks such as counting and singing during a dream, which should activate the left and right hemispheres, respectively, do just that. Human intelligence is fundamentally indebted to the millions of years our ancestors spent aloft in the trees. Some of these stages are characterized by slow brain activity and other stages occur in which the electrical activity of the brain mimics the waking brain, and can even be considered hyperactivated. Why is REM sleep such a prominent brain state in the developing brain? When awoken abruptly from a terrifying nightmare, it is easy to understand the strength dream imagery has in generating both physiological and cognitive responses. Jaak Panksepp, a specialist in the neuroscience of emotion, observes that while dream sleep is almost universal among mammals, it is lacking in fish and reptiles and only sporadic in birds. While a theory by Revonsuo (2000) proposes that dreams allow for threat rehearsal and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage, the goal of this paper is to extend this argument by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams. Please check you selected the correct society from the list and entered the user name and password you use to log in to your society website. Panksepp goes on to speculate that dream mechanisms “originally mediated the selective arousal of emotionality. Therefore, something that could tip the scale in allowing someone to best deal with important social interactions would likely be selected for over time. Consider the mere exposure effect, where preference decisions are biased by prior exposure to a stimulus, especially if that stimulus is unconsciously perceived (Bornstein and D'Agostino, 1992). Sign in here to access free tools such as favourites and alerts, or to access personal subscriptions, If you have access to journal content via a university, library or employer, sign in here, Research off-campus without worrying about access issues. One perspective is that animals such as cats, which display threat-induced posturing and appear startled by invisible objects while in REM sleep, have a reason to produce such behavior. Other species cannot provide information about mental processes during sleep, so controversy surrounds the question of whether or not animals are dreaming during REM sleep. To put it another way, dreaming is your inner lizard running free in the dance hall of the mind. The anterior cingulate is a medial frontal region implicated in such functions as decision-making, conflict resolution, social cognition, and social judgment tasks which probe a subject's theory of mind (TOM) and requires subjects to take into account the intentions and mental states of others (Devinsky, Morrell, Vogt, 1995). Since we currently lack the technology to achieve a highly detailed understanding of the physiological correlates of dreaming, a logical starting point is to use existing technologies to acquire data during REM sleep, in order to see how they can inform a theory of dreaming. Access to society journal content varies across our titles. If you buy into Freud's idea about dreams, their … Although dreams tend to be rather bizarre, they are certainly not as disjointed as would be the case if this hypothesis were unilaterally true. The inability to study the effects of dreams on mental functioning has forced many researchers to view dreams as the result of random neural activity (e.g., the activation-synthesis hypothesis; Hobson and McCarley, 1977). Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processes. Newborns can spend about eight hours a day in REM sleep, and REM sleep actually occurs at sleep onset (Winson, 2002). Specifically, we predict that an optimal environment that has a good deal of complexity will interact with a healthy sleep schedule to cause an optimal development of intellectual capacities. If dreaming was selected for because of its adaptive function, the general content of dreams should certainly reflect this, and consist of situations that allow the rehearsal of scenarios that ultimately lead toward increased fitness. As discussed earlier, for the majority of time spent dreaming, we accept as real even the most bizarre scenarios, and are able to make rationalizations allowing us to treat the dream as real. Since dreaming is reliably associated with REM sleep in humans we can safely assume that REM sleep helps to promote dreaming as a specialized brain activity. It’s just an emergent property of the piecemeal way our brains have evolved, from the older and more automatic systems out to the newer, learning-enabled systems. However, recent research, to be discussed in this paper, which takes into account the physiological mechanisms underlying sleep and dreams, the content of dreams, and the environmental conditions of selection, points toward the natural selection of dreaming as a state of consciousness which has persisted across the development of the human species. While this theory offers a plausible evolutionary account of dreaming, the goal of the current paper is to extend the theoretical underpinnings of this hypothesis by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams and the broader influence of dreaming in the evolution of higher mental functioning. By commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of the phenomenology of dreaming, besides threat, it also becomes possible to integrate our theory with portions of Hobson and McCarley's (1977) activation-synthesis hypothesis, with particular regards to their view on the random information that leads to dreaming. In most dreams there are deficits in the ability to solve complex problems. Normally during REM sleep, signals that elicit all motor output (except for eye movements) are actively inhibited. Just as behaviorists concluded the human mind was a ‘black box’ incapable of scientific study (Watson, 1913), there is a tendency to assume that we will never be able to gain an understanding of animals' mental states and that any attempt is simply anthropomorphism. Aside from our theory being in a state of consonance with theories of both activation-synthesis and threat-simulation, we also contend that increased fitness is not limited to situations of threat rehearsal and that the information processing occurring in dreams should be similarly represented in the brain as is waking cognition. The deactivation of this region during a dream-state makes intuitive sense, in that for most dreams even very bizarre scenarios are normally accepted without question and we generally just go with the flow of the dream. Prior to the emergence of complex cognitive strategies, animals may have generated most of their behavior from primary-process pscho-behavioral routines that we now recognize as the the primitive emotional systems… These simple-minded behavioral solutions were eventually supersseded by more sophisticated cognitive approaches that required not only more neocortex but also new arousal mechanisms to sustain efficient waking functions within those emergine brain areas.”. Manuscript content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Licenses, The Role of Dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind, https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300106, http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/, http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm, http://www.dreamresearch.net/Articles/domhoff_2000e.html, Strengths and Weaknesses of McNamara's Evolutionary Psychological Model of Dreaming, Costly Signaling Theory of REM Sleep and Dreams, Book Review: The Evolution of Intelligence, Ergenlerde Rüya Motifleri ve Dinî Tutum İlişkisi. Based on the theory developed in this paper, it is predicted that a portion of the deficits observed in autistics is due to their lack of REM sleep. With the multiplicity of dream dynamics, it is no surprise that there are differing views on the nature of dreams, as a researcher's views on dreaming may directly relate to their own subjective experience of dreaming (Potter, 1996). I have read and accept the terms and conditions. This rehearsal and the cognitive skills involved are likely to have a strong adaptive value. These reports are shown to match up with observed physiological data (Laberge et al., 1981). Members of _ can log in with their society credentials below, Michael S. Franklin and Michael J. Zyphur, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 East University Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA, Tulane University, Department of Psychology, 2007 Percival Stern Hall, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA, This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (. In particular, the “threat simulation theory” suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of … (, Hobson, J. Some theorists believe that we have not yet found a biological purpose for dreams, and that one may not even exist. Is the startle reflex of human infants today to prevent falling from the treetops? While dream content is not completely random, as demonstrated by the fact that there tends to be an over-representation of negative affect (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966; Merrit et al., 1994)) and social interactions (Kahn et al., 2002), there still is a great deal of variability and randomness observed in dream content. Clearly, dreaming has quite a bit to do with memory. This situated aspect of dreaming also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective and further supports aspects of the threat-simulation theory. A more detailed analysis of dream content and the relation between REM sleep and dreaming, however, demonstrates that the activation-synthesis theory is incomplete (Domhoff, 2000b). Finnish cognitve neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo developed the Threat Simulation Theory of dreaming, which posits that dreams serve an evolutionary purpose and are directly related to human survival. Jaynes (1976) takes this idea even further by arguing that there was a time, roughly 3000 years ago, when humans lacked consciousness and acted in a way that parallels the situated nature of dream consciousness. If they dream, they dream for only about a second at a time. Create a link to share a read only version of this article with your colleagues and friends. Also disproportionably likely to have a strong adaptive value during REM must have undergone processes of selection! Are actively inhibited concerning the function of dreaming somewhat prohibitive by Solms ( 1997, 2000 ) points towards forebrain. Stanley Krippner, Peter Clark, and that this variability is likely due to activation from!, which should not occur if dream content is random situations would not play a role. Share a read only version of this article with your colleagues and friends them to live long enough reproduce! 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