Scientists Identify Parts of Brain Involved In Dreaming (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have unpicked the regions of the brain involved in dreaming, in a study with significant implications for our understanding of the purpose of dreams and of consciousness itself. What's more, changes in brain activity have been found to offer clues as to what the dream is about. Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Siclari and colleagues from the U.S., Switzerland and Italy, reveal how they carried out a series of experiments involving 46 participants, each of whom had their brain activity recorded while they slept by electroencephalogram (EEG) -- a noninvasive technique that involved placing up to 256 electrodes on the scalp and face to monitor the number and size of brainwaves of different speeds. While the experiments probed different aspects of the puzzle, all involved participants being woken at various points throughout the night and asked to report whether they had been dreaming. If the participants had been dreaming, they were asked how long they thought it had lasted and whether they could remember anything about their dream, such as whether it involved faces, movement or thinking, or whether it was instead a vivid, sensory experience. Analysis of the EEG recording reveal that dreaming was linked to a drop in low-frequency activity in a region at the back of the brain dubbed by the researchers the "posterior cortical hot zone" -- a region that includes visual areas as well as areas involved in integrating the senses. The result held regardless of whether the dream was remembered or not and whether it occurred during REM or non-REM sleep. The researchers also looked at changes in high-frequency activity in the brain, finding that dreaming was linked to an increase in such activity in the so-called "hot zone" during non-REM sleep. Further, the team identified the region of the brain which appears to be important in remembering what a dream was about, finding that this recall was linked to an increase in high-frequency activity towards the front of the brain. A similar pattern of activity was seen in the hot zone and beyond for dreams during REM sleep. The upshot is that dreaming is rooted in the same changes in brain activity regardless of the type of sleep.

Comments

Re:I dream in code.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Unfortunately dream variables are all locally scoped - as soon as you wake up, they're undefined.

Re:What if you don't dream?

[rtb61]

You know what I an the other way round, I remember dreams as readily as normal everyday memories, no difference. Of course, just like everything I do not remember during normal daily activities much the same with remembering dreams. So what is the most interesting thing I remember from dreams is instances of deja vu. Every time I have an incident of deja vu I can place the dream and the memories that surround it even the segue into and out of the deja vu dream element. So that incident of deja vu is disruptive, using a car like analogy because it it like your pedalling along on your push bike life and all of a sudden you hit a tram track and you life is on a dream rail tracking exactly your current life experience, which is quite disturbing (that sense of loss of control). Whilst each instance of deju vu has not been at all illuminating. What I have noticed is, it causes a pause in action and a change of direction, no real useful information, just a jarring and a delay at the end of the experience often associated with a change of direction very subtle changes, turn left instead of right or just a sufficient delay. The most emphatic of moment deja vu was with another person waffling on and pulling up to a red light, the deja vu moment stopped when the light turned green and disturbed by it I did not take off, just as a person drove through a red light and would have tboned me on my side if I had moved (blind intersection so I could not see them until too late). So after fifty years odd of life and attempting to correlate deja vu with actual outcomes, its seems like a subtle push to change your direction possibly to avoid a very negative outcome, without any information about that outcome, just that subtle, well for most of you subtle tweak (at a guess a quantum consciousness push from the future to the past to the present, weird things happen down there compared to up here).

Now that deja vu thing is really disturbing mainly because of all those other dreams, whilst some of them have been quite fun, interesting and challenging, even life threatening I certainly do not want them to be instance of deja vu (I quite enjoy nightmares, I can always wake up or change it if bored or particularly annoyed). Now you could test for the validity of deja vu extending life, but there are of course two tricks in there, your life might no come under great threat so no deja vu and of course when deja vu fails, how do you tell.

Now statistically speaking it might not have any relevance due to the numbers of dreams you have, based around your own life and their potential to coincidentally align with future actions, keeping in mind the short duration of deja vu and no winning lottery numbers deja vu, not that I have ever dreamed of any and I struggle to read in dreams unless I specifically focus before hand.