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!!!解説
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I had a friend who tried hard to remember more of her dreams.
出典: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-you-shouldnt-tell-people-about-your-dreams/
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I had a friend who tried hard to remember more of her dreams. She would write them down and then tell people about them. She stopped, though, because it started interfering with her social life. She would start talking about her dreams, and people would leave the room.
There are several major theories about why we dream. One is the activation-synthesis theory, which holds that dreams are interpretations by our forebrain of essentially random activity from the spinal cord and cerebellum during sleep, especially rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Part of the explanation for why dreams can be so weird is that they are interpreted from chaotic information. The evolutionarily older parts of our brain are also the seat of our basic emotions. According to this theory, the emotion comes first, and dreams are made to make sense of that emotion. Evidence for this position comes from scene changes that happen: when we have anxiety dreams, for example, they often switch from one anxious situation to a different one—so rather than us feeling anxious because of the content of our dream, it could be that our feeling is causing an anxious narrative in the dream!
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Another major theory of dreaming is threat-simulation theory, which holds that the evolutionary function of dreaming is for us to practice how to behave in threatening situations. There is a lot of evidence for this theory, too.
First, most dream emotion is negative. Also, people tend to dream of ancestral threats: falling, being chased, natural disasters, and so on. These frightening elements are overrepresented in dreams—that is, we see them in dreams much more than our experience in our day-to-day world would predict. Many people dream of being chased by animals, but how often does this actually happen to people? The overrepresentation of animals chasing us in dreams, especially for children, suggests that we have some innate fear of them. In contrast, we do not dream of modern threats, such as heart attacks, as much as we would expect if dreams were based on the problems we actually face in today’s world.
These two theories of dreaming are often presented as competing, but as far as I can tell, they are compatible—that is, even if dreams are interpretations of chaotic input from the spinal cord, there is still a theory needed to describe how that chaotic input is elaborated into narratives that we experience as dreams, and it is quite possible that the mind takes advantage of this opportunity to practice dealing with dangerous things.
Why do we feel the urge to talk about our dreams? A suggested ramification of threat-simulation theory relates to the idea that “two heads are better than one”: discussion of dreams might be adaptive if they help us mentally prepare for threats. We like to talk about dreams to help us prepare for how to act in dangerous situations in the future.
Which leads us to why we find our own dreams so interesting. There are three reasons, based on known psychological effects, although all are speculative, in terms of my application of them to dreams.
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The first is negativity bias, which makes us pay attention to dangerous things.
Because most dreams are negative (support for the threat-simulation theory), our bias in favor of negative information makes them feel important.
The second reason has to do with the emotional primacy of dreaming—because so many dreams are so emotional, they feel important in a way that people hearing about them, not feeling that emotion, might find hard to relate to. Once I dreamed of a terrifying staircase. When I told my girlfriend about it, she laughed at me for being scared of such a harmless thing. In the dream, it was scary, but clearly my audience could not appreciate that.
We tend to think of dreams as being really weird, but in truth, about 80 percent of dreams depict ordinary situations. We’re just more likely to remember and talk about the strange ones. Information we do not understand can often rouse our curiosity, particularly in the presence of strong emotion. Just like someone having a psychotic experience, the emotional pull of dreams makes even the strangest incongruities seem meaningful and worthy of discussion and interpretation.
These reasons are why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people. But if you’re going to talk about some of your dreams, pick the ones in which you deal with a problem in some new way. The negativity bias would make them more interesting than your happy dreams, and if you feel that you learned something about how to deal with a threat, maybe your audience will, too.
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The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Jim Davies
Jim Davies is an associate professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is the author of Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe. Director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory, he explores processes of visualization in humans and machines and specializes in artificial intelligence, analogy, problem-solving, and the psychology of art, religion and creativity.
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In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual experiment:
出典: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/why-dont-we-have-universal-basic-income
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The Case for Free Money
Why don’t we have universal basic income?
By James Surowiecki
Illustration by Christoph Niemann
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual experiment: it started just handing out money to some of its citizens. The town of Dauphin, for instance, sent checks to thousands of residents every month, in order to guarantee that all of them received a basic income. The goal of the project, called Mincome, was to see what happened. Did people stop working? Did poor people spend foolishly and stay in poverty? But, after a Conservative government ended the project, in 1979, Mincome was buried. Decades later, Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, dug up the numbers. And what she found was that life in Dauphin improved markedly. Hospitalization rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And researchers who looked at Mincome’s impact on work rates discovered that they had barely dropped at all. The program had worked about as well as anyone could have hoped.
Mincome was a prototype of an idea that came to the fore in the sixties, and that is now popular again among economists and policy folks: a basic income guarantee. There are many versions of the idea, but the most interesting is what’s called a universal basic income: every year, every adult citizen in the U.S. would receive a stipend—ten thousand dollars is a number often mentioned. (Children would receive a smaller allowance.)
One striking thing about guaranteeing a basic income is that it’s always had support both on the left and on the right—albeit for different reasons. Martin Luther King embraced the idea, but so did the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, while the Nixon Administration even tried to get a basic-income guarantee through Congress. These days, among younger thinkers on the left, the U.B.I. is seen as a means to ending poverty, combatting rising inequality, and liberating workers from the burden of crappy jobs. For thinkers on the right, the U.B.I. seems like a simpler, and more libertarian, alternative to the thicket of anti-poverty and social-welfare programs.
There are signs that the U.B.I. may be an idea whose time has come. Switzerland held a referendum on a basic income last week (though it lost badly); Finland is going to run a U.B.I. experiment next year; and Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator firm, is sponsoring a similar test in Oakland. Why now? In the U.S., the new interest in the U.B.I. is driven in part by anxiety about how automation will affect workers. Bhaskar Sunkara, the publisher of the socialist magazine Jacobin, told me, “People are fearful of becoming redundant, and there’s this sense that the economy can’t be built to provide jobs for everyone.” In the short run, concerns about robots taking all our jobs are probably overstated. But the appeal of a basic income—a kind of Social Security for everyone—is easy to understand. It’s easy to administer; it avoids the paternalism of social-welfare programs that tell people what they can and cannot buy with the money they’re given; and, if it’s truly universal, it could help destigmatize government assistance. As Sunkara puts it, “Universal programs build social solidarity, and they become politically easier to defend.”
The U.B.I. is often framed as a tool for fighting poverty, but it would have other important benefits. By providing an income cushion, it would increase workers’ bargaining power, potentially driving up wages. It would make it easier for people to take risks with their job choices, and to invest in education. In the U.S. in the seventies, there were small-scale experiments with basic-income guarantees, and they showed that young people with a basic income were more likely to stay in school; in New Jersey, kids’ chances of graduating from high school increased by twenty-five per cent.
Critics of the U.B.I. argue that handing people cash, instead of targeted aid (like food stamps), means that much of the money will be wasted, and that a basic income will take away the incentive to work, lowering G.D.P. and giving us a nation of lazy, demoralized people. But the example of the many direct-cash-grant programs in the developing world suggests that, as the Columbia economist Chris Blattman puts it, “the poor do not waste grants.” As for the work question, most of the basic-income experiments suggest that the disincentive effect wouldn’t be large; in Manitoba, working hours for men dropped by just one per cent. It’s certainly true that the U.B.I. would make it easier for people to think twice about taking unrewarding jobs. But that’s a good consequence, not a bad one.
A basic income would not be cheap—depending on how the program was structured, it would likely cost at least twelve to thirteen per cent of G.D.P. And, given the state of American politics, that renders the U.B.I. politically impossible for the time being. Yet the most popular social-welfare programs in the U.S. all seemed utopian at first. Until the nineteen-twenties, no state in the union offered any kind of old-age pension; by 1935, we had Social Security. Guaranteed health care for seniors was attacked as unworkable and socialist; now Medicare is uncontroversial. If the U.B.I. comes to be seen as a kind of insurance against a radically changing job market, rather than simply as a handout, the politics around it will change. When this happens, it’s easy to imagine a basic income going overnight from completely improbable to totally necessary. ♦
James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.”Read more »
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