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    Home > Biochemistry News > Biotechnology News > Why does our brains go into the strange dream world every night?

    Why does our brains go into the strange dream world every night?

    • Last Update: 2020-08-09
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    Everyone dreams, and dreams are always associated with "strange" and "incredible", some dreams make us happy, some dreams make us afraid.
    , why do we dream? What happens in our brains when we dream? Why do we often not remember the plot of a dream? What does dreams mean to us? Can dreams help us learn? Can we dream what we want to do... The phenomenon of dreams fascinates ordinary people and dream researchers.
    scientists have come up with many theories to solve the mystery of dreams.
    let's take a look at how scientists explain strange dream phenomena.
    why do we dream? For centuries, humans have been trying to figure out: Why do our brains go into the strange dream world every night? The more rigorous scientific study of dreams began in the 17th century. In his book "The Analysis of Dreams", Freud, an Austrian neuroscientist and founder of psychoanalysis,
    systematically studied dreams from a psychological perspective.
    he believes that dreams are our pent-up desires, that we cannot express our desires in social settings, that we cannot be subconsciously active in the thoughts and desires that people accept. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist who worked with Freud in
    his early years, came up with different theories.
    he agrees that dreams have psychological roots, but at the same time, they also believe that dreaming allows us to reflect on our selves when we are awake, and we think about and solve some of the problems we encounter in dreams.
    since the 1960s, the study of dreams has entered the field of biological experiments.
    1953, Eugene Asseski, a biology graduate student at the University of Chicago, discovered that when a person turns from a shallow sleep to a deep sleep, the eyeball turns quickly, and when he turns from a deep sleep to a shallow sleep, it stops turning.
    the deep sleep phase of the eye's rapid rotation is called "rapid eye movement sleep" (REM), and the shallow sleep phase of the eye's staticness is called "non-rapid eye movement sleep" (NREM).
    if people wake up from fast eye movements during sleep, about 80 percent report that they are dreaming.
    Asseski's landmark discovery forced scientists to re-examine what happened during sleep, a golden age for dream research in the 1960s.
    William DeMont, a researcher at the University of Chicago, looked at eGlecharts and found that healthy adults go through five stages of sleep, and he defined more precisely the characteristics of the rapid eye movement sleep phase and other sleep stages.
    1973, Alan Hobson, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and his colleague Robert McCully proposed a new theory that dreams are just brain electrical impulses generated by randomly extracting memory fragments from memory storage during sleep by implanting microelectrodes into the brain stem to identify individual nerve cells that generate electrical impulses.
    this neurophysiological study of dreams has brought the world to a boil.
    over the past decade, with the application of advanced detection techniques such as X-ray tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, dream research has developed rapidly, allowing scientists to see not only the surface of the brain, but also a deep understanding of activity in the brain.
    scientists now know that the brain doesn't completely rest when we sleep.
    when a person enters rapid eye movement sleep, the limbic region of the brain is activated (the area is dedicated to various instinctive activities, including the regulation of sleep and awakening, the human sensory activity such as vision and smell, and the formation of various emotions), while the frontal cortex of the brain - the brain's execution center - is closed (this section is responsible for more advanced brain activity, including information reasoning, interpretation, and decision-making).
    , scientists have cracked more secrets about dreams. what happens in our brains when we
    dream? Now, scientists believe that dreaming is linked to fast eye movement sleep (new research suggests that dreams can also occur in non-fast eye movement sleep, but are rare, and less intense and clear than in fast eye movement sleep).
    William DeMont divides sleep into five stages.
    when we fall asleep, we go into the first stage of sleep, which is very light and easy to wake up, the second stage enters a little deeper sleep, and the third and fourth stages go to the deepest sleep.
    these four stages of sleep are non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM).
    as brain activity slows down, we go to deep sleep, and our brains feel nothing but ripple activity.
    wave is the slowest brain wave.
    after we go to sleep about 90 minutes, and after the fourth sleep phase, we move into the fifth stage, the rapid eye movement sleep (REM) phase, which is characterized by eye movement.
    at this stage, our heart rate and breathing rate increase, our blood pressure rises, we can't regulate our body temperature, our brains are active, even more active than when we are awake, but the rest of our body is basically paralysed until we exit the REM state.
    Because REM sleep is the most dreamy sleep phase, this temporary paralysis of the body allows us to ensure in the most natural way that we don't put our dream behavior into action, otherwise, if the person sleeping next to you dreams of playing football, you are likely to be kicked as a football kick.
    we have to go through these five stages of sleep many times a night, but the further we go, the more REM sleep (stage 5), the less deep sleep (stages 3 and 4), and by dawn, we have almost no first, second and fifth stages of sleep.
    , then, what would have happened without REM sleep? Early studies have suggested that sleep without REM means no dreams, which are like a safety valve in the brain that helps people vent emotions that cannot be released during the day.
    a study by scientists in 1960 that woke the subjects up every time they went to REM sleep, causing them to suffer from mild psychological disorders such as anxiety, irritability and difficulty concentrating.
    further research attempts to link REM sleep deprivation to memory difficulties, but more studies refute this claim.
    an irrefutable example is that a person who has no REM sleep due to a brain injury has no problemwith his memory, has successfully completed his law school work, and his daily life has not been affected.
    Now, researchers are trying to determine the effect of lack of REM sleep on certain learning abilities.
    why do we often not remember the plot of a dream? Some studies say that when we remember a dream five minutes after it ends, we forget 50 percent of the content;
    why do we quickly forget the content of dreams, but not so quickly forget our daytime actions? Freud believed that it was easy for us to forget our dreams because they contained our pent-up thoughts and desires, so we subconsciously did not want to remember them.
    other studies suggest that we can't remember what dreams are for a simple reason - other things prevent us from remembering them.
    a dream researcher of his contemporaries' time, pointing out that there are a number of reasons why we can't remember our dreams clearly.
    for example, when we wake up, we quickly forget many things, such as body perception, and many dreams are illusory in themselves, so they are easy to forget.
    , for example, we don't remember dreams because we don't deliberately pay attention to them and remember them.
    usually, we need to think and repeat to complete memory, but dreams are usually unique, and we rarely remember how dreams begin, so it's difficult to remember them.
    it's like someone saying you a word you didn't know before, you didn't use it any more in a short period of time, and you quickly forgot about it.
    since we can't go back to our dreams and experience it again, the details of dreams will naturally disappear from our memories.
    scientists now believe that people often don't remember their dreams when they wake up because most of the areas of the brain responsible for short-term memory are inactive during sleep, unless they suddenly wake up in a dream and, in general, dreams are quickly forgotten. Can
    dreams help us learn? Some scientists are working to explore the important link between dream and learning and memory.
    Israeli scientist Irene Vamlesss has found that people who enter non-fast eye-movement sleep and dream about video maze games played hours ago have significantly higher levels of computer games after sleep than those who enter non-fast eye movement sleep but do not dream.
    and if a person is in a sober state to recall video scenes, he play the game level can not improve much.
    , Walmsley, points out that while her research focuses on non-REM sleep stages, this learning ability also occurs at all stages of sleep.
    American scientist Matthew Wilson believes that dreaming is the human brain's experience of reviewing the daytime consciousness.
    he and his colleagues "tap" the activity of a single hippocampus neuron in an experimental mouse using fine electrodes, a brain region associated with spatial memory.
    individual neurons in the hippocampus of the brain react to a specific spatial location, and each time a mouse passes through a particular point in the maze, the corresponding individual neurons in the mouse brain become active.
    Wilson et al. successfully entered the dream of laboratory mice.
    they found that laboratory mice that walked through the maze during the day also dreamed of the maze at night.
    scientists who believe dreams can help us learn point out that some of the things people experience during the day are stored in the hippocampus of the brain, where the hippocampus's nervous tissue becomes hyperactive when the night goes into rapid eye movement sleep, and the brain repeats these memory fragments before transferring them to the brain's permanent memory region, the cerebral cortex.
    when the hippocampus replays pieces of daytime activity, the brain screens them to strengthen the connections between brain cells, thus forming memories, and what is newly learned is reinforced and consolidated.
    in the future, scientists may be able to use sleep and dreams as a learning tool, just as we learn and teach when we are conscious during the day.
    Can we dream what we want to do? In the 2010 sci-fi film "Dream Space," cob, the protagonist becomes a thief who can sneak into someone's dreams and steal secrets, and he can even "plant" ideas that don't exist in other people's dreams.
    scientists say that we may never be able to reach the level of Dream Space, but we can make a person's dream happier. how can
    make a person's dream happier? That's lucid dreaming. what is a lucid dream
    ? It is when you know you are dreaming and can control which direction the dream is going.
    fact, a lot of people have lucid dreams.
    survey found that 65 percent answered "yes" when asked, "Have you ever dreamed you're dreaming?"
    psychological research, lucid dreams not only allow us to enjoy the wonders of dreams, but also contribute to our physical and mental health, for example, it can enhance our self-confidence, overcome nightmares, improve mental state, and help creative problem solving.
    for people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups, lucid dreams can make their dreams accessible, paralysed patients can walk again in their dreams, and even indulge in dancing and flying.
    this mental perception exercise may even help stroke patients recover.
    lucid dream can also become a "world simulator".
    Just as flight simulators allow people to learn to fly in a safe environment, lucid dreams allow people to live in any conceivable world and experience them in a variety of possibilities to better choose their future.
    so, can we make ourselves lucid? Or can we dream what we want? In 1989, Paul Soli, an expert in German dream research, published a paper on how to induce lucid dreams.
    he proposed a way to induce lucid dreaming - "reflection technique".
    this induction is to train yourself to ask the question, "Am I dreaming?" when you are drowsy? American scientist Stephen Labech and others have come up with a similar method of dream control, "memory induction."
    specifically: telling yourself to remember your dreams when you go to bed at night, then concentrating your mind on dreaming to recognize it and remembering that it was a dream, and then re-entering the previous dream and looking for clues in it that could indicate that you are actually dreaming.
    you can also imagine how you want that dream to continue, for example, if you want to fly, then imagine yourself flying freely in your dream.
    you can repeat the last two steps (realize you're dreaming and re-enter your dream) until you fall asleep.
    it is said that LaBet uses this method to make all kinds of happy lucid dreams as he wishes.
    dream-control method is also known as "dream hatching", that is, in the process of dream induction to lay the seeds of future dreams.
    those who believe that dreaming can solve problems can use dream hatching and use dream-inducing techniques to direct their dreams to specific problems.
    for example, before you go to bed, you can remind yourself repeatedly that you'll dream about a speech you're about to make, or you'll dream of a pleasant vacation you've just had. it's a wonderful thing to have a dream
    .
    of course, it's hard to do, you need special psychological training to master and apply such skills. can
    dreams give us a harbinger? In his book, "Dreaming," Stephen Labech recounts the fact that one day a man takes his young son to a valley camping.
    he and his son came to the lake near the campsite, ready to take a bath, but found that he forgot to bring soap, so he asked his son to stand by the lake waiting for him.
    he saw his son pick up the pebbles and throw it into the water, so he walked away with confidence.
    's hair when he gets the soap back.
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