The Vivid Landscape of Dreams and Problem Solving

Speaker 1
Kekul, actually, was his name. August Kekul. He was the German
Speaker 4
guy I talked about earlier
Speaker 1
who had a dream of a snake eating its tail and realized from that dream that the shape of the benzene molecule is a ring. I don't know if that dream is true, but maybe that is in fact the point of dreaming. It's this time when you shut off the outside, turn inside, take the problems that you've got, and start to really work on them. Pull them apart. Make connections that you wouldn't normally make during the day.
Speaker 2
However, have you ever wondered why it would be necessary when solving problems like this to dream so vividly? Are you at all puzzled by the super-duper technicolor, extraordinarily cinematic quality of some of these things? Because if it were just an everyday brain function to sort of make sense of the world and allow you to make new connections, you really wouldn't need quite the movie quality. So
Speaker 4
when we talk about dreams, what seems to come into dreams are memories, concepts, relationships, associations that have a strong emotional flavor. And I'm guessing from the data need a full-blown orchestration to be properly processed. And it is. It's technicolor. The colors are overwhelming almost.
Speaker 1
So if I hear you right, what you're saying to Robert's question about why are the dreams so vivid is that I don't know, but maybe the vividness helps.
Speaker 4
That whole long answer is what a Harvard professor says instead of saying, I don't know.
Speaker 3
All Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie McEwen. Thank you. Hi, I'm Erica Inyonkers. Leadership
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support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.
Speaker 3
Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Speaker 5
On Notes from
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America, we have conversations with people across the country about how we can truly become the nation that we claim to be. Each week, we talk about race, our politics, education, relationships, usually all of them, because everything's connected. And you, our listeners, are at the center of those conversations. I'm Kai Wright.
Speaker 6
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