‘After millennia of people debating this’: Stanford neuroscientist conducts sleep study. Then he figures out why people dream

Dreaming has always been a subject of speculation, curiosity, and mysticism, which is only natural. After all, how kooky is it that every night, people essentially hallucinate sporadically while floating away from consciousness.

The question of why people dream, however, is up to fairly frequent debate in the scientific community. And one neuroscientist is going viral for offering up a piping-hot new theory.

‘The purpose of dreaming is to defend the visual territory'

Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman appeared as a guest on popular podcast The Diary Of A CEO. The podcast, which is hosted by entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, posted the interview recently.

The scientist explained that we dream to defend the visual cortex from a “hostile takeover” by other senses. The 90-minute episode, which has more than 2.1 million views, centered on Eagleman's fresh take on why people dream. A viral TikTok clip of the episode honed in on the meat and potatoes.

“If you go blind, the visual cortex of the back of the brain gets taken over by hearing and by touch and by other things, and it's no longer visual cortex,” Eagleman told Bartlett. “Well, what we realized is that because we live on a planet that rotates into darkness for half the time, the visual cortex, the visual part of your brain, is at a disadvantage.”

The effect on other senses

It's well-established that other senses heighten when sight is taken away. In 2017, Harvard reported that the “​​brain ‘rewires' itself to enhance other senses in blind people.”

“So what I realized is that the purpose of dreaming is to defend the visual territory from takeover from the other senses,” Eagleman said. “So every 90 minutes … you've got this very ancient thing in your midbrain that shoots random activity into the visual system and only the visual system—only this very tiny part of the visual system. Every 90 minutes, you just blast random activity in here. And the reason is you are just defending that territory against takeover.”

In the full podcast episode, Eagleman explained that his colleagues at Harvard conducted an experiment with a group of people who had full capability of sight. Then they blindfolded the participants for an hour.

“And it turns out that 60 minutes was sufficient for the visual cortex to start responding to sound and to touch,” Eagleman said. “You could start seeing that takeover happening after 60 minutes. And that's when we realized, ‘Wow, this part of the brain really needs a way of defending itself.'”

Eagleman's theory on dreaming, expanded

While other popular theories of dreaming posit that dreams file new memories into long-term storage or allow us to process complex emotions, Eagleman is offering a different idea. Perhaps dreams are more like “screensavers of the mind.” These “screensavers” prevent an individual's sense of sight from shutting off during long, sleepy stretches.

That leads to the question: Why do dreams take the form they do? If their only purpose is to keep the visual part of our brain engaged, why do dreams often possess a narrative quality?

In the podcast episode, Eagleman offered a simple explanation to Bartlett. The human brain is a “natural storyteller.” That means creating narratives is one of its primary functions. It therefore does the same with in-dream stimuli.

“If you blast random activity in there, it'll put that together in some sort of visual story about what's happening,” Eagleman told Bartlett. “Mostly based on what connections are hot from the day.”

In Eagleman's full write-up of his study, he explained that there's also a reason the visual cortex battles so fiercely for its spot in the skull. There is “ceaseless competition for brain territory” when it comes to the five senses. And while a brain takeover of hearing or touch might be advantageous for someone who becomes blind, “the rapid conquest of territory may be disadvantageous when input to a sense is diminished only temporarily, as in the blindfold experiment.”

Buzz News has reached out to Bartlett and Eagleman via email.

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