Rats have dreams too. Apparently.

Aug 01, 2009 01:35

Just got home from Denice's. Sometimes I really miss high school, because of my friends. :] They make everything seem... less messy and much easier. It was sweet how Pines referred to me as a "rare Pokemon," because I was always the one too busy to go to stuff, which is a shame really. Anyway, I'm extra happy because Denice let me borrow this book:



No, it's not a self-help book. :] (See, I kind of have this thing about pride and self-help books, though it's still subject to change, depending on how desperate I get. Haha!) Apparently, it's just like Freakonomics, except it's all about psychology, and happiness. So, it says, humans make decisions and act, thinking that all these things will make their future better and thus, will make them happy. But then, what we don't know is that apparently, our brains have this tendency to, y'know, fail us. :)) We think that our brains are perceptive and always consistently aware of everything therefore making its calculations, at the least, passable. What sometimes happens though is that, the decisions we've made to obtain happiness end up making us miserable (ex. me, when I'm moody), and it's all because our brain isn't as aware as we'd like to think it is. It's selective, and that's what gets us into trouble, it leads us to the wrong decisions. Or, well, at least that's what Denice said. She's only read like, 10 pages. :)) Can't wait to get to the 11th. :]

***

Rats have dreams too. Apparently. I was telling Denice and Pines about last night's pregnancy dream and how I've had two of them so far, which really bothers me. Denice said, dreams are coping mechanisms.

She explained that a bunch of scientists declared it so after this experiment on rats. The scientists made two sets of rats cross a small body of water, which is kind of a big feat for them because they avoid water as much as possible. Anyway, the first set of rats weren't allowed to dream. Before they reached the REM stage of sleep where dreaming happens, the scientists would wake them up, and continue to do so. The other sets of rats, they let dream happily. The results: the first set of rats who'd had no opportunity to dream at all couldn't manage to cross the water, the second set did so successfully. So there, they concluded that in some ways, the second sets of rats were practicing swimming in their sleep, or somehow lessening their fear and stress through their dreams. Thus, a coping mechanism.

literature, visuals, dreams

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