Word: arene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...abandoned stagnant theories of dreaming and postulated new and intriguing ones, with experiments underway in various parts of the world aimed at establishing the function of our nightly hallucinations. If recent work suggests anything, it's that there is such a function, or more than one, and that dreams aren't just neural waste. They may improve the quality of our sleep. They may prepare us for danger. They may embed memories. There are more theories than answers. But after years in the doldrums, dream research is moving forward again...
...While hugely influential, Hobson and McCarley's Activation-Synthesis model attracted hordes of critics, who protested that many dreams aren't merely cognitive fragments nor a succession of chaotic images, but so story-like, sequential and dramatic that the thinking brain must surely have played a more substantial role in their production than the last-minute editing of a pile of neural bloopers. And there's the matter of lucid dreaming, in which people become aware in the course of a dream that they are, in fact, dreaming, and are able to control the course of events-a phenomenon that...
...enjoyable, informative, even revelatory to the dreamer," says Harvard's Stickgold. "But dream analysis is a more tricky question. The more dogmatic and doctrinaire the beliefs of the analyst, the less useful and potentially more destructive the analysis process becomes." People should understand, he adds, that dreams aren't constructed with the goal of delivering a message; they don't have an inherent meaning. "But when you look at your dreams after you wake up... you can often feel the associative networks that were activated during dream construction, and trace them back a ways, and maybe discover...
...eventually shows up in the remote islands as severe shortages of food, chronically ill and unschooled children and dire family poverty. This lack of administrative oversight and political will brings resentment, to be sure. But it also allows charlatans to flourish. When natural resources such as fish and trees aren't being plundered, then assets like public land and houses are being stolen by crooked politicians and officials. Normality, for these unlucky folk, is a short hop from despair...
...told police was trying to rob him and a female companion at gunpoint near the French Quarter. Then there's the possibility that a gun will be stolen and used in other crimes. But as long as the sense of being under siege persists, such concerns aren't likely to dampen sales of guns, pepper spray, guard dogs and other weapons in New Orleans...