Today in lecture we will focus on dreaming, trying to answer a basic question: what can we learn from our dreams? We will examine whether dreams are meaningful, how they differ from our other experiences and whether they are "brain events" or "mind events". Having started on this topic last class, we will begin with the "Who dreams" and "Theories of dreaming" topics below.

Slides for this lecture are at dreams.

        The major topics we will be discussing include:

• Dreams as behavior--characteristics and description
• Brain function during dreaming
• Rapid Eye Movements and dreaming
• Who dreams?
• Theories of dreaming:
• The psychoanalytic theory (Freud ) (Accompanied by a brief intro to psychoanalysis)
• The Hall/Cartwright confirmations of and revisions to Freud.
• Implications of the Dement and Kleitman (REM) work
• Physiological theories of dreaming (purging connections, sorting memory, random, activation-synthesis, memory storage, etc.)


We will conclude with the question of whether can we obtain meaningful insights about ourselves through our dreams?

• Basic Methodology.
• Experiments: independent and dependent variables.
• Observational vs experimental studies: causation and correlation.
• The central issue of experimental "control".
• Measurement: The description of data.
• Central tendency: means, medians and modes.
• Variability: variance and standard deviation.
• Correlation and significance level


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