Cognitive Dream Speech Research
At first sight dream speech plays only a marginal role in dream theory. However the important connection of dream and speech is very well illustrated by the following statement of David Foulkes: "However visual dreaming may seem, it may be planned and regulated by the human speech production system." (see e.g. Kilroe, 2001).
Recent research has confirmed one of Kraepelin's fundamental disturbances. In the book, The Committee of Sleep, Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett describes examples of dreamed literature—in which the dreamers heard or read words which they awakened later wrote and published. She observes that almost all the examples are of poetry rather than prose or fiction, the only exceptions being one- or several-word phrases such as the Book title Vanity Fair which came to Thackeray in a dream, or similarly Katherine Mansfield’s Sun and Moon. Barrett suggests that the reason poetry fares better in dreams is that grammar seems to be well preserved in dream language while meaning suffers and rhyme and rhythm are more prominent than when awake—all characteristics which benefit poetry but not other forms.
In other work, Barrett has studied verbatim language in college students' dreams and found them similar in these characteristics—intact grammar, poor meaning, rhythm and rhyme—to the literary examples. She observes that this is suggestive that of the two language centers in the brain, Wernicke’s area must not be functioning well, but Broca's area seems to be as this language resembles that of patients with Wernicke’s aphasia. Essentially the same conclusion Kraepelin reached in 1906.
Read more about this topic: Dream Speech
Famous quotes containing the words cognitive, dream, speech and/or research:
“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatist I have so carefully posited ‘reality’ ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“If you don’t have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)
“There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral—well, he is here. He squats in me.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“One of the most important findings to come out of our research is that being where you want to be is good for you. We found a very strong correlation between preferring the role you are in and well-being. The homemaker who is at home because she likes that “job,” because it meets her own desires and needs, tends to feel good about her life. The woman at work who wants to be there also rates high in well-being.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)