Dr. Matthew Walker

It's the reason that Freud remains to this day, because we can't...

put him in a way in a box and say, we've disproven him, but we equally will never be able to prove him.

And therefore he's been in some ways let go in hard science as being representative.

His theory, which we don't need to get into, which was called disguised censorship is

was really a very interesting proposition, which was that there was something about our dreams that was veiled and masked.

And Freud believed that he understood the decryption code to our dreams.

And if you tell him your dream, he has the special filter that he can pull that dream through the filter and magically out on the other side is the true meaning of that dream.

There are several problems with that theory, not least of which I think at the time, if you look at his writings, it seemed that Freud was probably doing enough cocaine to kill a small horse at the time, but we'll put that aside for a second.

The issue there is that it's not very replicable as an analysis method.

And there's a fascinating study that was, I remember from a conference, I should check to see if it's been fully published.

And they did something clever.

They took the Freudian method and they took a single dream from one individual and they had

three Freudian psychoanalysts analyze that dream.

So it was the same dream, but three different analysts.

Now in a scientific protocol, if it's a scientifically rigorous assessment tool, you would get back the very same answer from that measurement technique all three times or very similar.

So for example, a carbon dating machine,

If I were to take a fossil and put it in a carbon dating machine and then another one and another one, for the most part, they're probably going to return something that's much more similar than different in terms of the carbon date of that fossil.

Why?

Because it's been very well validated and replicated.

That's what you want from a scientific method and tool.