Watching black and white television as a child may explain why older people are less likely to dream in colour than younger people, according to new study reported in New Scientist.
The study is from psychologist Ewa Murzyn, who was interested in how early experience could affect our dream life.
She first asked 60 subjects ‚Äì half of whom were under 25 and half of whom were over 55 ‚Äì to answer a questionnaire on the colour of their dreams and their childhood exposure to film and TV. The subjects then recorded different aspects of their dreams in a diary every morning.
Murzyn found there was no significant difference between results drawn from the questionnaires and the dream diaries ‚Äì suggesting that the previous studies were comparable.
She then analysed her own data to find out whether an early exposure to black-and-white TV could still have a lasting effect on her subjects dreams, 40 years later.
Only 4.4% of the under-25s’ dreams were black and white. The over-55s who’d had access to colour TV and film during their childhood also reported a very low proportion of just 7.3%.
But the over-55s who had only had access to black-and-white media reported dreaming in black and white roughly a quarter of the time.
It’s an interesting study because, as we recently discussed, philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel argued that exposure to TV was an unlikely explanation for the effect where we’ve tended to report more coloured dreams in modern times and suggested this actually showed we’re not very good at introspecting into our own minds.
This study provides some evidences that the effect may be more reliable than we think.
However, I’m still puzzled by why television would seem to have such a big influence so many years later when most of the visual experience the person would have received as a child, even if a heavy TV watcher, would be from the ‘real’ coloured world.