Siddhartha Ribeiro
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Siddhartha Ribeiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If you look into the brain areas that are involved in daydream, they're the same as those involved in nightdream. When we plan something in the future, when we travel in the past, when we tell a story about our own life, when we make a story up, all those situations involve activation of those brain regions that that we need to have empathy to be able to put ourselves in other shoes.
So very likely what allowed our ancestors to develop technology, to develop new ideas, to develop culture and enter this process of accumulation of culture is something that was propelled by dreams.
This art is not produced at the entrance, at the very entrance of the caves, but very deep in the caves. They had to go for hundreds of meters. And then they needed to use fire to be able to draw or paint.
For example, when you have like a bison, the bison has many legs. It doesn't have four legs. It has more legs. And this seems to be an attempt to produce the impression of motion.
They're those paintings that are not just beautiful and impressive, but they are also suggestive of magic, of mental imagery that had some purpose, that was the mixture of people and other animals. A human torso with a bison head, for example.
And this is probably a function that was facilitated by dreaming by REM sleep that conduces a reactivation of memories that is not very strict, that is quite lax. Now, if we transport ourselves 30,000 years in the past and we imagine these situations
The only logical thing to conclude is that people would come out of those dreams absolutely sure that they had encountered godly entities in search of guidance.
And if you don't have any other theory about... what dreaming is like. Why would you doubt that, right? Why would you wake up in the morning saying, I had this dream about this lord of the beasts with big antlers that came and helped me plan my hunt. But no, this is probably illusion. No, this is not the conclusion that our ancestors took.
Quite contrary, they concluded that those dreams were a proof of the existence of those entities and they should be paid attention. So all those things point to a very rich mental life. These ancestors of ours were dreaming. All non-aquatic mammals have REM sleep. So it's safe to say that our ancestors in the Paleolithic were dreaming a lot.
As far as we look back, our ancestors were dreaming. And as soon as they had language, they were sharing those dreams.
If you're disconnected from that, if you just live from waking life to waking life and you never remember your dreams and you never share your dreams with anybody, and you never take your dreams into consideration for any decision, you're living a life that is entirely different from the lives of our ancestors. We did not evolve to have this lack of relationship to dreams. We evolved with dreams.
Dreams were important to define what we are. And I think that a lot of what people are feeling nowadays, this sense that we are going nowhere, this sense that we are going alone, this sense that we have no roots, that we have no connection to the past. This, I think, has to do with our lack of sleep and lack of dreaming.
Well, Rand, I think you're touching a very good point here, which is that dreams are simulations of possible futures, which means that they are often wrong. And that's why in all those ancient cultures, there is the need for dream interpretation.
Dreams should not be taken at face value. Dreams, and people knew this across cultures. People knew it in the ancient world. Now, dreams have been, of course, appropriated for political reasons many, many times. In the Roman Empire, it happened all the time. For example, Julius Caesar had a dream, well, reported a dream, when he was less than 30, in which he would have sex with his mother.
And this dream was used politically many, many years later. when he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Rome and caused a civil war, this dream was used at this moment politically to say that the dream was actually a good premonition because he was having intercourse with his mother, so he was taking control of the motherland. In all different cultures, a dream could decide a war.
A dream could decide the end of a war. A dream could decide whether kings would marry or make peace with their neighbors. In a way, until the end of the Middle Ages, dreams were the only possible light into the future. It was noisy, it was metaphorical, it was imprecise, but was nevertheless some sort of insight into the future.
However, in the past 500 years, two things started to develop very strongly, which opposed the importance of dreams. And those are capitalism, on one hand, and science, on the other hand. Capitalism and science have been developing hand to hand, together, intertwined, one feeding the other.
And then after the development of proper science, and that, I think, is related to capitalism, the insight into the future became technical, scientific.
However, I think it was a mistake, and it is a mistake for us, to replace one with the other. Because the kind of insight we can get from dreams is very different from the insight we get from science.
When Freud was a young doctor, he was a scientist. He saw himself as a scientist. And he was trying himself in different fields of science, of neuroscience.
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