From: miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: DREAMS
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 22:20:26 GMT

In article <C0HxzH.GwD@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> neath@brazil.psych.purdue.edu (Ian Neath) writes:
>In <1993Jan7.174544.21426@tcsi.com>, miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner)
>>------- STORIES, DREAMS, AND LEARNING: A PARADOX.
>>Strange stories help us learn.
>>Dreams are nothing if not strange stories.
>>Dreams (in some way not yet understood) also help us learn.
>>And yet, DREAMS THEMSELVES ARE HARD TO REMEMBER!

>The cognitive psych literature helps clarify.

How about: "the cog-psych literature has some possible explanations?"

>					    First, it is not the
>fact that the stories are strange that makes them memorable; rather,
>it is the fact that the stories involve interaction between the
>various elements.

That's a little counterintuitive: sometimes things that have lots
of interactions are very hard to remember.  So there must be more to
it than that.

I've read that adrenaline helps imprint memories.  Strangeness
(and the thrill of inventing your own strangeness) might help
stimulate adrenalin production, thus imprinting the memory
more easily.

> 		Most strange things typically involve much inter-
>action.

One of the more memorable dreams posted here included a neon-blue
stone.  A monochromatic, single object -- not much interaction there.
The plain fact is that it was odd as hell, while being very simple.

>         Second, dreams may well be strange stories, but Third,
>dreams do NOT help people learn.  Rather, dreams retard forgetting
>by reducing the amount of interfering material.

This is the "garbage collection" theory of dreams.  Any experimental
evidence that this model is more accurate than any other?

>					     This has nothing
>to do with REM or any other dream state; any will do as well as
>any other.

"Any other dream state" apart from REM?  That's rather rare and
fleeting, from the literature I've read.  So why is it that people
have so much less retention when deprived of REM sleep (while
allowed every other kind of sleep)?

>		 Finally, dreams are more or less hard to remember
>for different people.  One reason they may be more difficult is
>because of context (or state-dependent) effects:  people are
>more likely to remember information when the retrieval and learning
>contexts match.

It's true that I sometimes remember a dream I might otherwise
have forgotten because I see something in waking life that
reminds me of something in a dream.

>	       To increase the chances of recalling a dream,
>write it down as soon as you wake up:  your state then is more
>similar to the state during dreaming than when fully awake.

I've been doing this, on and off, for years -- the technique
is no mystery to me.  What IS a mystery is how elusive dream
memories are, still.  Alan Hobson says that the real reason
traces back to the neurochemistry of dreaming -- that the
chemical environment of the brain inhibits learning at critical
points.

>Any reasonable text on introductory cognitive psychology will
>provide more info.

You mean more theories.
---
Michael Turner
miket@tcs.com