Rat’s Imagination — Patricia Churchland

[KenOtwell]

Love me some Churchland. Plus I've always thought course-coded representations don't get enough attention aside from word embeddings.

[LukeMyth]

I sometimes think dreams are used to distinguish from reality ontologically and that they provide a different representation which we can compare experienced to.

Maybe a rat rest is like a representational rerun for pondering but the dream rest went asleep is nonrepresentational .

My point is as I get older I dream less except it seems when I am confronted by big changes when I seem to dream more but I’m not scientific about this .

Therefore, you could look at dream activity in people with changed environments and new stresses upon them and maybe compare this to activity in the hippocampus which needs to be regenerated or modified perhaps with the help of dream imagery as a kind of counterbalance to their everyday reality of realistic world.

Maybe if dreams to help us adapt to change predicaments it would make sense that children dream more and old people dream less because old people are more adapted and more habitual .

I don’t know about dream memory and its relationship to everyday memory, but maybe this needs exploring?

What uses all of this abstraction? Well a friend told me to tell my flat more where as I dream of being outside more I sit in bed and fantasise about being outside in order to achieve and fulfil life ambitions in an indirect manner rather than work on essential, skills of home and basics like that.

So therefore if somebody is not functioning in terms of behaviour perhaps it is not laziness but it is a lack of emotional impact which every day people have to things like dirty dishes.

I’m not that bothered and my threshold for being bothered by untidiness is quite high . Therefore, maybe if I can learn to associate emotion with housework I might start to daydream about it and do some more rather than practising my dance skills on the way to the shops instead?