B&W TV Generation Has Monochrome Dreams 343
Ant writes "The Telegraph reports that people over 55 who were brought up watching a monochrome TV set are more likely to dream in black and white, even years later. New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the color of your dreams. While almost all under-25s dream in color, many over-55s, all of whom were brought up with B&W sets, often still dream in monochrome. The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that '... there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed ... [B]efore the advent of black and white television all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color.'"
I smell BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they seriously suggesting that something people saw for a few hours a week in black and white determined how they dream for the rest of their lives? The 90% of the time spent living in full colour was just swept away, because TV is just so fucking powerful? I bet no proper study will ever reach the same conclusion.
Not Properly Controlled (Score:5, Insightful)
"The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that"
It sounds like they didn't properly control this experiment. By having two groups with such drastically different ages, there are now two variables: what kind of TV someone grew up watching, and age. Maybe older people are more likely to honestly admit they dream in black and white, or maybe they lose the ability to dream in color as they age. I think most people can't remember the minute visual details of their dreams, so experiments like this can easily introduce a bias in how one describes his dreams.
pseudoscience (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, please. What, they think the generation before TV (the radio generation) dreamed in audio only? Did the people of Shakespeare's time dream in iambic pentameter?
Good ol' pseudoscience rears it's ugly head again.
Dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
Remembering back to my psych classes, colour and B&W dreaming tend to happen at different parts of the sleep cycle. Colour is more common in REM, while dreams during NREM sleep are more likely to be in B&W.
Since sleep patterns change as we age, it seems probable that this has far more to do with the age of the study participants. Since people were asked to record their dreams in the morning, they will tend to remember those dreams from their most recent sleep cycles.
A better approach would be to conduct a proper sleep study, in which people of different ages are woken at different parts of their sleep cycle (as detected by EEG) and asked about their dreams and whether they were in colour. Anything else is an extrapolation too far and subject to too many other factors.
Re:I have doubts about this (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, so since your sample of 1 contradicts the study they need to increase their sample size and do the study again! Good thinking!
Neither B&W nor color (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless they are specifically about color, dreams are just thoughts that are neither B&W nor color.
It's equivalent to remembering a past experience. Even though we can remember exactly how an event played out, color is not part of it unless it has some significance in the memory.
Re:I smell BS (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is based on a survey a psychology student did, and only 30 people in the survey were over age 55. I think a bit more research needs to be done before we can draw the conclusion the article is trying to make.
It's dreams all the way down... (Score:3, Insightful)
But you have to admit it's an intriguing suggestion. I have for a long time believed that film, TV, and literature serve a similar purpose for society as a whole as dreams to for the individual, so it makes perfect sense to me that one should reflect the other. Our own dreams are a mechanism for us to sort out our experiences of the prior day, to test hypothetical scenarios, and to act out our wishes and impulses that we might not be able to respond to because of law or social mores.
The media clearly serves some of these functions for the "collective conscious" as well. It entertains and informs us, and just like our own dreams it is rich in symbolism, subtle messages, and parallel plots. It is far less limited than the "real world" in what it can express, such as plots which may explore illegal or immoral acts, and special effects or animation which allow these stories defy the limits of the physics. Perhaps just as video and literature collectively is the product of many different minds coming up with a rich interconnected web of ideas, so do our own dreams serve as a mechanism for different corners of our conscious to share their information and knit it together.
Re:I shudder to think (Score:1, Insightful)
about how the youtube generation will dream...
*Buffering....*
B&W TV Generation (Score:2, Insightful)
The over 55 crowd also contains a lot of people who grew up without television. Being one of those I can tell you for sure all my dreams are not in B&W or in color. The most interesting thing about this topic is that it demonstrates once again, some people's obsessive need to EXPLAIN EVERYTHING, even if it means putting forth fantasy as fact.