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)
“Reagan was a flesh and blood version of any other mute national emblem, say the Statue of Liberty. Everyone knows what she represents, but no one would dream of asking her opinion.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Men talk, but rarely about anything personal. Recent research on friendship ... has shown that male relationships are based on shared activities: men tend to do things together rather than simply be together.... Female friendships, particularly close friendships, are usually based on self-disclosure, or on talking about intimate aspects of their lives.”
—Bettina Arndt (20th century)