= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
prase comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (187)
It surely seems improbable that most of people in the 1920s were dreaming black and white while today 80% dream in color. The perceptions can be culturally influenced in principle (I don't assume a significant biological change happening during the 20th century), but it is far more probable that a substantial part of people report about their subjective experiences incorrectly. The probable reason is that people can't remember what their dream was exactly like (or perhaps it even has no sense to speak about colors in dreams) and their report is contaminated by their expectations of what it should be, which are more easily subject to cultural influences. We may say that the flaw is in the memory and not in the experience itself, but that doesn't contradict the point of the original post. Lukeprog hasn't said that the experiences are wrong, but only that people can be wrong even about thier own experiences - and inconsistent reporting about the quality of dreams certainly requires being wrong about them.
If this study occurred in the US then it isn't so improbable. In the 1920s the primary form of entertainment were black and white movies. This might have had enough influence that many of the people who would have had dreams in color had substantial parts of those dreams in "color" but the only relevant colors were black and white. (This notion is partially inspired by my own dreams- I dream in color, but occasionally cartoon characters show up, and when they do, they look like they would in the cartoon even as they interact with normal people, or something sort of like that. So it isn't implausible to me that something similar could happen with black and white characters.)
That did occur to me, but I doubt the real influence of movies can be that big as to make all dreams of 80% of people black and white. What seems more likely to me is that the colour of dreams (or actually the whole visual quality of dreams) is hard to remember, a person familiar with b/w movies would be likely to assume that dreams are similar to movies, and therefore report that they were black and white. But the two theories seem very hard to distinguish empirically.
You could have people watch only black and white movies for a while and see if they were more likely to report dreams being in black and white. This would work since people today know that entertainment isn't in black and white. Alternatively, one could take black and white media and project it in some strange color scheme (like say orange and blue) and see if people started dreaming in that.
That would distinguish the hypotheses
But it will not decide between