From the article: It’s perfectly possible, in other words, to have an explanation that is at once trivial and profound, depending on what kind of question you’re asking. The strength of neuroscience, Churchland suggests, lies not so much in what it explains as in the older explanations it dissolves. She gives a lovely example of the panic that we feel in dreams when our legs refuse to move as we flee the monster. This turns out to be a straightforward neurological phenomenon: when we’re asleep, we turn off our motor controls, but when we dream we still send out signals to them. We really are trying to run, and can’t. If you feel this, and also have the not infrequent problem of being unable to distinguish waking and dreaming states, you might think that you have been paralyzed and kidnapped by aliens. There are no aliens; there is not even a Freudian wave of guilt driving the monster. It’s just those neuromotor neurons, making the earth sticky. The best thing for people who have recurrent nightmares of this kind is to get more rem rest.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 14:27:07 +0000
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