Deirdre Barrett – författare

With a breadth including breaking research from around the world, this set created by a team of experts is the most authoritative source that exists regarding the biology and psychology of dreaming. Readers will not only understand the new science of dreams, but how that science could lead to innovations in the medical, social technical and biotech fields.Although it has been described since ancient times, dreaming remains a somewhat mysterious mental process, and scientists around the world continue to study its mechanisms and meanings. In this unique set of books, experts in the field from around the globe gather to show the newest and most exciting research and findings related to the biology and psychology of dreaming. New studies of dream content, for example, show that across age groups, cultures and clinical groups, dreams have recurring themes. New brain imaging techniques show us specific brain regions involved in dreaming. Other research featured here describes the biology or psychology of realistic and bizarre dreams, of symbolic images in dreams, and of how differences in gender and personality affect dreams and dreaming. The newest and most extensive source of information on dreaming in existence, this set gives readers insights into how this new science could lead to innovations in the medical, social, technical, and biotech fields.Dozens of contributors—some top experts in their fields known internationally—show us how brain functions affect and are affected by dreaming and why these new findings should be important to all of us. Volume I spotlights the biology of sleep and dreaming. Volume II focuses on dream content and its many facets. In Volume III, the many theoretical accounts of dreams are presented.

Have you ever wondered why some men choose pornography over actual women? Why so many people watch Friends instead of going out with their own buddies? Why a person would “feed” a plastic Pocket Pet while shirking real duties? Why both sides of every war see the other as the aggressor against whom their “Department of Defense” must respond?Harvard evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how human instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection—developed for life on the savannah ten thousand years ago, not for today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. Evolution, quite simply, has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes of modern life. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects—from candy to pornography to atomic bombs—that gratify outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results.In the 1930s Dutch Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen found that birds that lay small, pale-blue eggs speckled with gray preferred to sit on giant, bright-blue, plaster dummies with black polka dots. He coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe these imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and, oddly, exert a stronger attraction than real things. Obviously these hard-wired preferences pose a danger to a species’ survival. Barrett’s singular insight is to apply this phenomenon for the first time to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment. Her book adroitly demonstrates how supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity, our addiction to television and video games, and the past century’s extraordinarily violent wars. Man-made imitations, it turns out, have wreaked havoc on how we nurture our children, what food we put into our bodies, how we make love and war, and even how we understand ourselves.Barrett does more than pull the fire alarm to show how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. There is a hopeful message here as well. Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds: a giant brain. The message of this book is that this gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and save ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.

According to the poet Elias Canetti, “All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams.” To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of “wish fulfillment,” and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers—among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks—to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential “traumas of normal life,” such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.