Deirdre Barrett
Deirdre Barrett is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and the author of Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, published by W. W. Norton in 2010. This site uses the book for its subtitle only, as a marker of where the idea of the supernormal stimulus moved from animal behaviour to human urges.
Who they are
Barrett is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and of the American Psychological Association's Division 30, the Society for Psychological Hypnosis, and editor in chief of the journal Dreaming. Her research areas include dreams, hypnosis and imagery, and evolutionary psychology, including supernormal stimuli. Her books include The Committee of Sleep (2001), Waistland (2007), which looks at weight and fitness through the lens of supernormal stimuli, and Supernormal Stimuli (2010). She has also edited volumes on trauma and dreams, on the new science of dreaming, on hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and an encyclopedia of sleep and dreams.
Key papers
Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06848-1. Cited for its subtitle only. The book's text was not read for this page.
Key ideas
The subtitle states the book's claim: that primal urges have overrun their evolutionary purpose. That is a claim about human appetites and the artificial cues that exploit them, and the book's evidence was not reviewed here. On this site the supernormal stimulus remains an experimentally grounded idea in animals and an analogy in people, as the article on feeds sets out.
Sources
- Biographical details are from a contributor profile on Closer to Truth. Publication details for the 2010 book are from bookseller records. Neither the book nor her papers were read for this page.