In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains

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It isn't only amnesiacs whose brains confabulate. There is no good reason why dreams, which consolidate memories, should take a narrative form. If they're filing away memories, we should just experience memory fragments as each is processed. The cortex's narrative drive, however, doesn't turn off during sleep. Like an iPod turning on that cassette player, the fill-in-the-gaps that works so well for jumpy eye movements takes the raw material of memory and weaves it into a coherent, if bizarre, story. The reptilian brain lives on.

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