Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains

For our new hypothesis about the function of dreams, see our paper:
Eagleman DM, Vaughn DA (2020). The defensive activation theory: dreaming as a mechanism to prevent takeover of the visual cortex. Front Neurosci. 2021 May 21;15:632853. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.632853

For a summary of the ideas, see our article in Time Magazine:
When he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. His mother took him to the doctor and soon discovered he had retinal cancer in both eyes. After chemotherapy and radiation failed, surgeons removed both his eyes. For Ben, vision was gone forever.

But by the time he was seven years old, he had devised a technique for decoding the world around him: he clicked with his mouth and listened for the returning echoes. This method enabled Ben to determine the locations of open doorways, people, parked cars, garbage cans, and so on. He was echolocating: bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and catching the reflections to build a mental model of his surroundings.

Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.” Continue reading at Time.com