| So Luke, for our next psychology assignment we have to do something on sleep and dreams. |
| Right. |
| I've just read an article suggesting why we tend to forget most of our dreams soon after we wake up. |
| I mean, most of my dreams aren't that interesting anyway, |
| but what it said was that if we remembered everything, |
| we might get mixed up about what actually happened and what we dreamed. |
| So it's a sort of protection. |
| I hadn't heard that idea before. |
| I'd always assumed that it was just that we didn't have room in our memories for all that stuff. |
| Me too. |
| What do you think about the idea that our dreams may predict the future? |
| It's a belief that you get all over the world. |
| Yeah, lots of people have a story of it happening to them, |
| but the explanation I've read is that for each dream that comes true, |
| we have thousands that don't, but we don't notice those, |
| we don't even remember them. |
| We just remember the ones where something in the real world, |
| like a view or an action, happens to trigger a dream memory. |
| Right. |
| So it's just a coincidence really. |
| Something else I read about is what they call segmented sleeping. |
| That's a theory that hundreds of years ago, |
| people used to get up in the middle of the night and have a chat or something to eat, |
| then go back to bed. |
| So I tried it myself. |
| Why? |
| Well it's meant to make you more creative. |
| I don't know why. |
| But I gave it up after a week. |
| It just didn't fit in with my lifestyle. |
| But most pre-school children have a short sleep in the day don't they? |
| There was an experiment some students did here last term to see at what age kids should stop having naps. |
| But they didn't really find an answer. |
| They spent a lot of time working out the most appropriate methodology, |
| but the results didn't seem to show any obvious patterns. |
| Right. |
| Anyway, let's think about our assignment. |
| Last time I had problems with the final stage, |
| where we had to describe and justify how successful we thought we'd been. |
| I struggled a bit with the action plan too. |
| I was OK with the planning, |
| but I got marked down for the self-assessment as well. |
| And I had big problems with the statistical stuff, |
| that's where I really lost marks. |
| Right. |
| So shall we plan what we have to do for this assignment? |
| OK. |
| First, we have to decide on our research question. |
| So how about 'Is there a relationship between hours of sleep and number of dreams?' |
| OK. |
| Then we need to think about who we'll do the study on. |
| About 12 people? |
| Right. |
| And shall we use other psychology students? |
| Let's use people from a different department. |
| What about history? |
| Yes, they might have interesting dreams! |
| Or literature students? |
| I don't really know any. |
| OK, forget that idea. |
| Then we have to think about our methodology. |
| So we could use observation, |
| but that doesn't seem appropriate. |
| No. |
| it needs to be self-reporting I think. |
| And we could ask them to answer questions online. |
| But in this case, paper might be better |
| as they'll be doing it straight after they wake up... |
| in fact while they're still half-asleep. |
| Right. |
| And we'll have to check the ethical guidelines for this sort of research. |
| Because our experiment involves humans, so there are special regulations. |
| Yes, |
| I had a look at those for another assignment I did. |
| There's a whole section on risk assessment, |
| and another section on making sure they aren't put under any unnecessary stress. |
| Let's hope they don't have any bad dreams! |
| Yeah. |
| Then when we've collected all our data we have to analyse it |
| and calculate the correlation between our two variables, |
| that's time sleeping and number of dreams |
| and then present our results visually in a graph. |
| Right. And the final thing is to think about our research and evaluate it. |
| So that seems quite straightforward. |
| Yeah. So now let's... |