Dr. Baland Jalal
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Baland Jalal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
To put it shortly, like if I have an encounter with a serial killer in my dream and I sort of overcome that, I'm not killed by it, right, by that serial killer. I can navigate that situation in an appropriate manner. I'm more likely to survive in real life.
So it shows you that dreams has a lot to do with survival and training the circuits in the brain, making them solidify the ones that can help me survive more. So that's a huge opportunity.
And that's a good point. So the fact is that, you know, when you dream, your brain takes you on this exploration, right? And it looks at various social scenarios, for example, that evoke emotions in you. So it takes, you know, Dr. Peterson and put him in a room with... with Kim and Joe and see how he reacts.
If the reaction is not an emotionally evocative one, it will literally take you and show you another scenario until it hits on a scene that evokes your emotion, that gets you riled up, and then it explores that.
It has to have that element, and then it will go down that path more and explore it more. It'll say, this is interesting.
Not necessarily. So it does, there's a huge dopaminergic aspects to dreams. So it's been shown that if you have a lesion to a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobule, again, it's a region just below the superior parietal lobule, it's involved in creating images, but also it's, so if you have a stroke there, for example, you won't dream or the mesolimbic dopamine centers,
This is a fancy name for the part of the brain where you have dopamine going to the prefrontal cortex. If you have a lesion there, you won't dream as well. So bliss and dopamine, as well as images, is involved deeply in... Okay, so it's emotional intensity and valence. Intensity valence, yeah.
Tilted somewhat towards the negative.
So it's very interesting. So one thing that I want to make clear as well, it's that, you know, obviously, as you know, there's a corpus callosum, that there's a bridge between the two hemispheres, allowing the two hemispheres to communicate, right? So you have the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.
So these hemispheres, if you literally cut it, you'll have two consciousness in one person, right? So it seems like dreams is also right hemispheric dominance for another reason, because the things you will see in your dreams are like... poetry, right? It's visual metaphors that you can't explain in language, right?
So I can, it's like going through an art museum and looking at things, but in a very poetically, beautifully, non-language way, right? So you can't describe it necessarily. And obviously the left hemisphere, the regions of the Wernicke and stuff like that is involved in language and understanding language. But it seems like the poetic aspect of dreams is very much a right hemispheric thing as well.
Well,
Yeah, and I think what is also interesting about dreams and that whole thing is that it seems to tap into a circuitry that's more mystical than the circuitry that we normally tap into. By mystical, I mean it seems like some of the, receptors involved in mystical experiences when you take psilocybin and things like mescaline and DMT and stuff like that, the serotonin 2A receptors.
So one theory actually talks about how... So obviously serotonin is another neurochemical in the brain. The part of the brain that produces that, the dorsal rafin nucleus, also shuts down its production of serotonin. So you don't have serotonin in your dreams either in REM sleep. And so you end up in this space without noradrenaline and without serotonin.
But it seems like for some reason that the serotonin 2A receptors become dialed up. So that part of the serotonin 2A receptors become tickled for some reasons.
It also happened in psilocybin experiences.
The mystical experiences and the dream experiences. So there's something there that's hypercosmic in dreams that you can't, it's ineffable. You can't describe it in language. And it's highly personal and it has salience for you. So one thing that I noticed about dream is a lot of people come and talk to me about their dreams all the time. They'll go, Baland, you know, I had this dream.
I saw this and that, and they're very emotional about it. And it's highly personal and cosmic, right? But, you know, I kind of go, oh, that's interesting, but it's not really that interesting. But it has that significance for you as a person. And that's kind of about the dream thing. It has personal salience, kind of the type of personal salience you can get from a psilocybin experience.
It kind of unites them, yeah.
That's very interesting. So let's go on that whole thing, right? So the monster in your dream represents your hyperactive amygdala and the limbic centers of the brain being hyperactive, up to 30% more active in the dream landscape, right?
Showing 81–100 of 177 · page 5 of 9
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