There's a One in Ten Chance You're Dreaming Right Now [Reality]
Math! It's hard enough to wrap your head around even when it's not systematically unraveling your understanding of reality. For instance: there's a pretty decent chance you're dreaming right now. No, seriously; math says so. The mid-morning mind-frak springs from the highly advanced brain of Jan Westerhoff, a philosophy professor and metaphysics researcher at the University of Durham. In the ambitiously titled book Reality: A Very Short Introduction, Westerhoff breaks down why your present reality might not be so real: We optimistically assume that you get eight hours of sleep a night, which leaves sixteen hours during which you are awake. Sleep researchers have found out that there is a strong correlation between dreaming and being in so-called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM sleep is characterized by rapid movement of the eyeballs; the brain is highly active, its electric activity resembles that of a waking brain, but the sleeper is more difficult to wake than du...