Posted on Sep 19, 2018
Famed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick asked “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which was adapted into the film Blade Runner. Getting inside the head of a human baby, wrote the science journalist Angela Saini in a 2013 piece for The Guardian, “is like deciphering the thoughts of a kitten.”
“Infants spend most of their time sleeping, waking up for just a few hours total every day. A lot of growth happens during those spans of shut-eye, though. Research shows that sleep is just as formative for babies’ development as are the scattered bouts of consciousness when their eyes are open and their ears are perked up. As with adults, sleeping likely helps infants retain or protect memory and learn language; some evidence also suggests it promotes healthy physical growth.”
Technological advances are helping to shed more and more insight on, as the University of Washington professor of early-childhood learning Patricia Kuhl has put it, “the infinite number of secrets” contained in babies’ brains,” continues Alia Wong in The Atlantic.
One secret that those advances have yet to uncover: whether babies dream—and, if they do, what they dream about. Brains are composed of so many intangible phenomena, and the technologies used to measure the stuff that is tangible (like brain-scanning machines) are difficult to use on babies. The resulting mystery has made the topic an endless source of intrigue—and of pointed disagreement— among many researchers.
During sleep the mind is a “remarkable engine of problem solving.”
In the 1960s, as the journalist Alice Robb explains in her forthcoming book Why We Dream, the psychologist David Foulkes theorized that children seldom remember their dreams before age 9. Foulkes continued his research into pediatric dreaming over the decades and in his 2002 book on the topic concluded that humans are dreamless in their first few years of life.
Just because they can “perceive a reality,” he wrote, doesn’t mean they “can dream one as well.” Instead, he found that children don’t start dreaming until they’re a few years old and can imagine their surroundings visually and spatially. Even then, he argued, the dreams tend to be static and one-dimensional, with no characters and little emotion. It isn’t until age 7 or so, according to Foulkes, that humans start to having graphic, storylike dreams; this phase of life is also when children tend to develop a clear sense of their own identity and how they fit into the world around them.
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Image credit: With thanks to galaxypress.com
Top 10 Space & Science Headlines of 2018
“Spying on Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures” –Scientists Pursue Undiscovered Species of Whales Swimming Below Since the Eocene
The Alien Observatory: Ancient Stars 6-9 Billion Years Old in Milky Way’s Halo –“May Harbor Advanced Civilizations”
“Point of No Return” –MIT Scientist Predicts the Event Horizon for Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction
Artificial Intelligence Is Already Out There, and It’s Billions of Years Old” (WATCH Video)
‘Ghost Signals’ of Extraterrestrial Civilizations Haunt the Milky Way –Suggests the New Drake Equation (WATCH Video)
“Odds That There has Never Been Another Civilization in the Universe One in Ten Billion Trillion” –A Joe Rogan Interview
The Alien Observatory –“The Mystery of Where Extraterrestrial Life is Hiding Deepens”
“We’re Entering Uncharted Territory” –The Exoplanet Revolution May Reveal that Rise of Civilizations May Not be Unusual
“The Big Rip” –When Matter and Spacetime are Gradually Torn Apart Through Expansion of the Universe
“Humans are the First to Arrive at the Interstellar Stage” –Physicist Answers the Fermi Paradox