[ad_1]
Today, dream research is done by scientists. They are still trying to figure out how night images come about, what their main function is, how to handle and interpret them.
Sleep is not just a calm state of the body.
We all know that sleep is an important part of our lives; about a third of our lives we fall asleep. Although sleep is understood as a relatively calm state of our body, when it is disconnected from the outside world, our body and brain rest, allowing various restorative processes of the body or the incorporation of experiences acquired in memory schemes, not all sleep is truly peaceful. At regular intervals, every hour or hour and a half, our brain becomes extremely active, the rhythm of breathing intensifies, and the heart begins to beat much more rhythmically.
While the body remains immobile, our closed eyes begin to move rapidly. During this rapid eye movement (REM) sleep phase, we are immersed in a dream world that looks a lot like our reality when we wake up. Afterward, we travel with our dream body, interact with other characters, try to implement our plans, solve certain problems. We are often overwhelmed by strong emotions and we are often frustrated. All of our senses are real, in a dream we act and react to situations as if things are really happening, and usually only when we wake up do we realize that all this was just a dream that took place in our inner reality, not in the outside world.
We can dream of five dreams a night, they are generally colored. The vast majority of people dream in colors, while those who do not dream in colors are only 4 percent.
Why do we almost always see colorful dreams these days ?, he replied in 1942. A study was conducted. According to him, the number of those who did not dream in color was extremely high: 40 percent. These results are believed to have been influenced by watching black and white television; when it disappears, the black and white dreams almost disappear.
Do animals dream too?
The classic of psychology, Sigmund Freud, considered dreams as a royal road to subconscious cognition. However, perhaps the greatest impetus for the development of dream science came from the 20th century. In the early 1960s, recurrent REM sleep and its close association with dreams was discovered – in early experiments, 80 percent. Participants who woke up from REM sleep in the sleep lab reported having one vivid dream, while among those who woke up from another, NREM (non-REM) sleep was only a small percentage.
REM sleep has been observed not only in humans but also in animals: mammals, birds. French neurologist Michel Jouvet, who did minor damage to the cat’s brain bridge and removed the centers responsible for muscle atony (“shutdown”), found that cats begin to act as if they were awake during REM sleep: they begin to move, walk, catch prey, play, wash, but he does everything with his eyes closed and completely insensitive to the environment. At first glance, this might seem like indisputable proof that cats, and with them other animals, dream in REM sleep in the same way as humans, but this is not so obvious, because dreaming is first and foremost a subjective experience and the only way to find out. if someone dreamed they wonder. So we don’t know if animals and very young children (REM sleep begins when the fetus is still in the womb) are dreaming because we don’t get a chance to ask them about their subjective experiences during sleep.
The ability to remember dreams is different.
According to some authors, animals and young children do not dream at all, because dreaming is highly dependent on language skills and development. According to them, dreaming is a cognitive activity that requires concepts and representations.
While there are people who say they don’t dream, we all likely dream if we don’t have neurological damage in certain areas of the brain (like the medial prefrontal cortex or the temporal parietal junction), simply our ability to remember dreams is very different. Some people remember their dreams every morning, others don’t remember them all year long.
Studies show that people with poor dream recall actually have less brain activity in these areas of brain memory associated with dream recall, both during REM sleep and while waking, compared to those who remember well your dreams. However, even those who very badly remember waking up their dreams in a REM sleep laboratory often tell them what they just dreamed of. In the sleep laboratory, researchers can collect multiple descriptions of dreams during the night from different stages of sleep. It is possible to analyze the content of dreams, compare it with changes measured in physiological parameters (brain activity, eye movements, respiration, heart rate, etc.), try to influence the content of dreams with external stimuli (sound, light, smell, etc.) or stimulation of certain areas of the brain.
In dreams we model threats
Science still doesn’t have an unequivocal answer as to why we dream, just a wide variety of theories. Freud, already mentioned, believed that dreams allow us to satisfy wishes in a transferable way. According to another classic of psychology, Carl Jung, dreams are the language of our subconscious that helps maintain our mental balance because dreams bring to the surface what we are not paying attention to consciously.
Modern dream theories, seen more from a neuroscientific and evolutionary perspective, treat dreams more as a kind of simulation of reality in which we learn and test various scenarios. In one of the most outstanding theories proposed by the Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo, based on the fact that dreams are dominated by strong negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, anger, it is considered that the main function of dreams is the threat simulation. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in an environment fraught with danger, and the ability to deal with threats was critical to survival, so dreams evolved as a means of modeling threats and testing various ways to overcome them. while our bodies rest and regain strength.
Dreams act like a virtual reality game
The modern environment has changed significantly, so the role of dreams is no longer as important as it used to be, but the mechanisms have survived, so we are now modeling more social than vital threats. Other theories emphasize the role of modeling dreams as social interactions, its influence on the regulation of emotions, and the consolidation of memories. The so-called continuity hypothesis has a solid empirical basis: our experiences in dreams reflect our experiences, worries, and thoughts during the day. Dreams, like waking, are unlikely to have a single function, they act as a multifunctional simulation of virtual reality, like a game: you can creatively test different situations and interactions in a safe context. Interestingly, animals that play in REM sleep (mammals, birds) play more in nature, and also play more in infancy, when there is also more REM sleep (newborns spend about half of their time sleeping in REM sleep phase, then they age) decreasing).
Brain sleep and conscious sleep
One of the most pressing problems in modern dream research is the neurocorrelation of dreams: the search for neurological mechanisms in our brain related to dream experiences. Three years ago, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA, with a high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) identified a “hot spot” in the posterior cerebral cortex associated with dream experiences during REM sleep and NREM. Interestingly, in terms of activity levels in this area at higher delta and beta EEG frequencies during NREM sleep (when dreams are remembered much less frequently than during REM sleep), the researchers with almost a 90 percent chance could have predicted whether a person waking up from the NREM dream would remember the dream or not. Such research can help to understand subjective dream experiences during sleep and provide information on deeper questions of consciousness that have been of increasing scientific interest in recent years: how conscious experiences arise in general, as it makes it possible to compare the presence (absence) and the absence. ) in the same physiological state of sleep.
Another intriguing area of research is conscious dreaming, where the dreamer perceives that he is dreaming and can transmit a signal to the researcher in a sleep laboratory through eye movements. The ability to communicate in real time with a person who dreams creates truly unique conditions for dream research. It is possible to observe the brain and other physiological changes by performing various tasks in dreams, marking its performance with eye cues, or exploring the nature of consciousness by observing how conscious perception develops in a dream. The efficacy of conscious dream induction techniques, the ways of applying conscious dreams in the development of motor skills or creativity, their metacognitive mechanisms (e.g. links with mindful awareness) are among the research directions that we are developing with colleagues.
[ad_2]
