IUBio

Is it possible to read someone's mind?

maxwell mmmaxwell at hotmail.com
Sat May 19 20:02:20 EST 2001


yan king yin <y.k.y(at)lycos(dot)com> wrote in message news:9e5vei$cam5 at imsp212.netvigator.com...
> "Theophilus Samuels" <theophilus.samuels at btinternet.com>:
> > Technically, the proportion of quiet sleep (i.e. greater muscle tone, steady
> > respiration and adequate temperature homeostasis) remains much the same from
> > birth to old age, at about 5 hours per night. But rather it's the amount of
> > active sleep or REM sleep (i.e. eye movements, flaccid skeletal musculature,
> > erratic respiration and heart-beat, loss of temperature control) that
> > decreases with age.
> 
> Agreed, just want to add that REM sleep is when dreams occur,

*most* dreams.

 and dreams are usually _not_ the exact play-back of daytime activities.

Nearly never, if ever. For one thing, the absence of real-time sensory afference is
a big difference, even though many of the same substrates of perception are
active during dreaming 'replay' (which is but a fragment of the content of dreams)

  Freud has pointed
> out an example where the alarm clock ran off while a person was sleeping and
> in his dream he heard an ambulance passing by (or something like that).  This
> seems more like free association to me.  REM sleep also has a *higher* meta-
> -bolic rate than wakefulness, thats why its also called paradoxical sleep.
> So, why does the brain engage in costly REM sleep?
> 
> (To generate random connections?)

Not necessarily random. Let's stay with your idea-- of dreams as replay.
By definition, this is non-random activity.
Resolve this contradiction, please.

-maxwell 
> 
> 




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