I’m not very compelled by the argument (which Schwitzgebel also makes) that “it’s extremely unlikely that black and white TV actually changed the contents of people’s dreams.” I agree that reporting bias is a strong contender, and perhaps twice as plausible a hypothesis as the naïve one, but not much more.
Here’s an ad-hoc explanation of the mechanism by which black-and-white film/TV/newspapers/photos could actually change the process of dreaming. (Epistemic status of the following sentences: pure speculation, but seeming not-implausible.) Dreaming is a top-down reversed-perception process, like the way generative deep networks can hallucinate a plausible image that would be captioned with a certain sentence. Only, in dreaming, instead of generating sensory experiences to match “captions,” our brains generate them to match stories, with “story” being a relatively primitive type in the brain’s type system. In premodern times, most human experience with storytelling involved direct sensory experience of a storyteller speaking and gesturing, and imagined sensory experience of what the action might have looked like (based on memories of first-hand experiences, and perhaps paintings, stained-glass windows, etc). But in the US in the 1950s, most experiences of storytelling were mediated by mass media with grayscale visuals. A viewer might add imaginary touch, or perhaps even imaginary taste and smell, but thanks to our brains’ ability to process nighttime scenes (without color vision), it isn’t really necessary as a passive viewer to imagine a colorized version of a story’s visuals. So, when the brain was in REM and generating sensory experiences to match a story, it was quite biased towards generating the visual ones in grayscale.
Most of the dreams I’ve ever had (and remembered in the morning) were not about any kind of received story (media, told to me, etc). They were all modified versions of my own experiences, like school, army, or work, sometimes fantastically distorted, but recognizably about my experiences. A minority of dreams has been about stories (eg a book I read), usually from a first person point of view (eg. a self insert into the book).
So for me, dreams are stories about myself. And I wonder: if these people had their dreams influenced by the form of media, were they influenced by the content as well? Or did they dream about their own lives in black and white? The latter would be quite odd.
I’ve definitely dreamed about being in a Minecraft world doing Minecraft things (actually in the world myself—not sitting at a computer), and likewise for other video games I’ve played extensively.
I’m not very compelled by the argument (which Schwitzgebel also makes) that “it’s extremely unlikely that black and white TV actually changed the contents of people’s dreams.” I agree that reporting bias is a strong contender, and perhaps twice as plausible a hypothesis as the naïve one, but not much more.
Here’s an ad-hoc explanation of the mechanism by which black-and-white film/TV/newspapers/photos could actually change the process of dreaming. (Epistemic status of the following sentences: pure speculation, but seeming not-implausible.) Dreaming is a top-down reversed-perception process, like the way generative deep networks can hallucinate a plausible image that would be captioned with a certain sentence. Only, in dreaming, instead of generating sensory experiences to match “captions,” our brains generate them to match stories, with “story” being a relatively primitive type in the brain’s type system. In premodern times, most human experience with storytelling involved direct sensory experience of a storyteller speaking and gesturing, and imagined sensory experience of what the action might have looked like (based on memories of first-hand experiences, and perhaps paintings, stained-glass windows, etc). But in the US in the 1950s, most experiences of storytelling were mediated by mass media with grayscale visuals. A viewer might add imaginary touch, or perhaps even imaginary taste and smell, but thanks to our brains’ ability to process nighttime scenes (without color vision), it isn’t really necessary as a passive viewer to imagine a colorized version of a story’s visuals. So, when the brain was in REM and generating sensory experiences to match a story, it was quite biased towards generating the visual ones in grayscale.
Epistemic status: anecdote.
Most of the dreams I’ve ever had (and remembered in the morning) were not about any kind of received story (media, told to me, etc). They were all modified versions of my own experiences, like school, army, or work, sometimes fantastically distorted, but recognizably about my experiences. A minority of dreams has been about stories (eg a book I read), usually from a first person point of view (eg. a self insert into the book).
So for me, dreams are stories about myself. And I wonder: if these people had their dreams influenced by the form of media, were they influenced by the content as well? Or did they dream about their own lives in black and white? The latter would be quite odd.
I’ve definitely dreamed about being in a Minecraft world doing Minecraft things (actually in the world myself—not sitting at a computer), and likewise for other video games I’ve played extensively.
A friend once had a dream where he alt-tabbed between two dreams.