Dreaming has got to be one of the weirdest things we do.
I mean, I don't want to diminish all the other strange crap our bodies are capable of,
'cause a lot of it is pretty cracked out.
But dreams are a special kind of crazy.
Like, no matter how many dreams you've had in your life,
Every once in a while, you wake up like:
"What the hell was that?"
But, as with everything else, science is helping us understand why we dream,
what our brains are up to when they're doing it,
and why dreaming may be critically important to the functioning of our waking brain.
So try to stay awake for this one, 'cause it's pretty cool.
(intro)
People have been trying to understand dreams since there were people,
but the person we most associate with the science of dreaming
is probably Sigmund Freud.
In 1899 he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams,
where he sugested that dreams were largely symbolic
and allowed us to sort through the repressed wishes that piled up in our unconscious mind.
And most of those wishes, you might have noticed, involve kind of weird sex stuff.
Freud was, you know, Freud.
In wasn't until the 1950's, when scientists first had tools
that allowed them to read the electrical activity of the brain
that we began to understand what a dreaming brain was really up to.
Two researchers of the university of Chicago, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman,
pioneered this research by hooking people up to the newly invented EEG machine,
and monitoring their brain activity while they slept.
What they thought they'd find was that the sleeping brain, was a resting brain.
But what they discovered was exactly the opposite.
They found that the brain activity actually fluctuates
in a predicable pattern over a period of about 90 minutes.
The cycle takes sleepers from an initial period of drifting off,
gradually into a really deep sleep with slower brain activity
back into almost awake.
And the state of sleep where the sleepers were almost awake again was the most interesting.
Brain activity in this phase was almost identical to when people were awake.
But even more weird, during this stage the subjects became functionally paralyzed.
The only parts of their bodies that moved were their eyes,
which darted back and forth under their eyelids.
So you know this part already; Aserinsky and Kleitman called this period R.E.M. sleep,
after the rapid eye movement that characterized it.
They also called it paradoxical sleep, because the subject seemed to be
awake according to their brain activity, even though they were basically dead to the world.
They probably figured that these names were better than
"sexually aroused sleep",
which is another common feature of this stage.
But another thing that scientists found out was that if R.E.M. sleepers were awakened,
they reported having really vivid dreams that were often emotionally intense.
It wasn't the only stage of sleep in which subjects dreamed,
but it was the time that they reported having the most lifelike dreams.
It turns out that every 90 minutes or so,
during the final stage of the sleep cycle, the brain phases into the R.E.M. sleep
and our brains start creating crazy narratives that might last between 20 and 30 minutes.
This is when you have those crazy, really vibrant dreams that you can almost confuse with reality.
So, why so busy, sleeping brain, and what's so important about dreaming
that you have to paralyze my entire body in order to have realistic dreams?
Well there are probably several answers but
one of them is that during the periods of dreaming our brains are making important connections
between real life experiences that will help us in our waking lives.
These days researchers are finding that Freud was wrong about dreams
in at least one important way.
We don't dream much about our hidden desires.
We mostly dream about what we did that day.
When we're sleeping our brains are sorting through what happened while we were awake,
deciding which new experiences were important enough to remember
and which ones should get tossed.
And searching for links between seemingly unrelated events
that might help us be a more successful human tomorrow.
And it's actually really important that we do this while we are asleep.
Because our conscious, waking brains are generally too controlling
to allow this kind of creative problem solving.
And this dream time activity helps our waking brains be better at things
that require making connections and thinking outside the box.
Dreams have actually been responsible for some really important inventions and discoveries in history.
For instance, Dmitri Mendeleev came up with the system
for his structure of the periodic table of elements
in a dream, after months of gruelling, conscious thought was getting him nowhere.
And research shows that our brains are much better at solving puzzles
if they are allowed to take a nap in the middle of doing one.
In 2004, for instance, subjects were asked to search for links between 2 sets of numbers.
The subjects who napped solved the puzzle 60% of the time
whereas only 25% of non-nappers were able to do it.
In another study where people were asked to find connections between seemingly unrelated words,
those who lapsed into R.E.M. sleep between sessions solved 40% more puzzles than those who didn't.
So dreams are all about making associations and finding patterns that our waking brains have a hard time detecting.
that our waking brains have a hard time detecting.
But it seems to work slightly differently in non-REM sleep than in REM sleep.
During non-REM sleep you dream, but the dreams aren't necessarily vivid.
And they're often about something that you've been doing or thinking about a lot.
During these stages people often report dreaming about kind of boring stuff.
Like if you spend a lot of time in the car during the day,
that night you might dream about driving down a long street, stopping at a series of stop lights.
This might seem lame, actually is pretty lame, but is kind of useful to the brain in it's own way.
It's telling itself things that it already knows,
like when you're driving a car you're supposed to stop at stop lights.
So in non-REM sleep it's basically reinforcing existing connections.
But in REM sleep we get to test out that reinforced knowledge in a context
that's virtually indistinguishable from real life.
It's like our brain running a simulation.
So say you were driving to your parents' house in Boca Raton all day.
In the non-REM sleep you spend a good 20 minutes doing boring stuff
like practicing stopping at traffic lights.
So during REM sleep your brain might have you trying to steer a steamroller
through Manhattan from the back seat.
REM dreams can be very life-like and very stressful, but that's a part of it.
A vivid REM dream is an opportunity to safely let us try something difficult.
Cause our brains aren't here to make friends. Our brains are here to win.
The evolutionary purpose of dreaming, like the evolutionary purpose of virtually everything else we do
is to make us more successful animals tomorrow than we were yesterday.
In REM sleep, the brain is actually trying to experience the future in order to test possibilities.
So maybe you're making out with your 7th grade algebra teacher on Jay Z's yacht
while wearing a banana suit.
What of it? Does it mean you subconsciously wanna make out with your 7th grade algebra teacher?
Maybe, but not necessarily.
Does the banana suit have something to do with penises?
I don't know! I'm not Freud!
The thing is, during REM sleep you can try that experience with no consequences whatsoever.
Another benefit of REM sleep is that it helps us process emotions
that our dunderheaded waking brains aren't really equipped to handle.
Although the content of our dreams may be wacky, the emotions attached to them are completely real.
Remember, your dreaming brain is charged with working on real-life problems.
So if you feel really angry at your boyfriend in a dream,
chances you're probably pretty pissed at him or maybe someone else you're close to in real life.
The stories our dreams create are essentially attempts to give our emotions a narrative
that can kind of suck the poison out of them and give them a form our brain can deal with better.
In fact, there are people who can't experience REM sleep,
and they often experience other psychiatric disorders.
So dreams help regulate the traffic between our experiences, our emotions and our memories
so we can dial down the crazy.
And hey, if the outcome makes your rational brain a little bit uncomfortable,
well, that's just how the sausage is made, folks.
Since I'm on the topic of weird dreams in REM sleep,
a lot of you have said that you'd like to know more about what's called 'lucid dreaming'.
This is when you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming
and can actually direct the narrative of the dream.
Since REM sleep is a simulation in the brain, lucid dreaming is basically a simulation
that lets a portion of your conscious brain in on the action.
Most of us can probably recall at least one lucid dream,
and about 1 in 10 of us have them regularly.
Some lucid dreamers can even communicate with researchers studying them
through gestures, like eye movements and hand squeezes.
What ultimately separates lucid dreams from regular old REM sleep
may lie in the physiology of the brain.
During non-REM sleep the cerebral cortex, that's your gray matter,
loses the ability to associate with other parts of the brain.
This probably why those dreams are more boring and less complex,
but once a dreamer reaches REM sleep, the cortex becomes active again
and begins talking to other areas of the brain.
Except for this one little part of the cortex called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
that doesn't reactivate.
This is the region right about at your left temple that's responsible for,
among other things, applying memories to other situations.
Like planning stuff and predicting outcomes.
This helps explain why REM sleep dreams are often so weird.
Your brain literally can't tell what's going to happen next.
But during lucid dreaming the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex actually does wake up,
which is probably why we regain a sense of self-awareness and can plot out stories for ourselves.
Some people claim that lucid dreaming can help with reoccuring nightmares
or even help cure depression and anxiety.
The jury though is out on that, but dreaming itself, all kinds of dreaming,
is definitely useful and even imperative to the function of the brain.
So, if you're still awake, go take a nap or something. Cause it's good for you.
Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow. I hope you learned something.
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