What is the brain doing when we dream?

Dreams are often so strange and meaningful that sometimes we want to tell someone about 'adventures' this night. But if we understand what is happening in the brain when we are dreaming, we will know that the dream really means more than what we previously thought.

Here are some common questions about night illusions that we call dreams.

1. Why are dreams often bizarre?

There is a pretty compelling reason to explain that our dreams are often confusing and strange. Memories of life events stored in a part of the brain are called hippocampus , and in rapid eye movement (REM) . When we sleep, the signals from the hippocampus are turned off.

That means we cannot access the specific memories that happened in the past while we dreamed, but we can still access the common memories of people and places - the The thing is the 'backbone' of dreams. At the same time, emotional activity in the brain regions is triggered, forming a story that engages memories together.

For example, recently you dreamed of a flood around your childhood home, and you tried to fly out the window to escape but couldn't fly. Fear and anxiety overwhelmed you because floodwaters are rising very fast while you are stuck in the house.

At this time, the prefrontal cortex is responsible for logical reasoning and our decision also stops working. That's why I didn't ask why the floodwaters were rising so fast or why I was in my childhood home or why flying out in a new window was a safe choice.

The difference in brain activity during sleep and the awakening explains why we find ourselves unable to control dreams and when strange things happen we can only observe and not what.

2. Can we only dream during REM sleep?

For decades, dream studies are like imaginary explanations rather than scientific results. But things changed in 1953, when researcher Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago conducted the EEGs of volunteers and woke them up in different sleep stages. Later, they discovered an association between REM sleep and dreams.

Recent experiments have shown that we dream during sleep, not just during REM sleep, but most of us forget them. Dreams that occur in deep sleep are often boring, not lively and often involve only simple things, and hard to remember. But in REM sleep, strange dreams appear: strange competitions, unbelievable achievements, illogical stories and confusing .

There are also many people who wonder if, during REM sleep, will our eyes turn to 'look' at the images taking place in the dream? Some recent experiments show that this can happen.

3. Why are we so hard to remember dreams?

Some people insist that they never dreamed, but they were wrong! This has been proven in the experiment of waking up volunteers in different sleep stages: everyone dreams but not everyone remembers dreams.

This may be due to brain activity. People who can remember dreams often have activities (both in sleep and in the province) in two parts of the brain involved in remembering images and storing memories better than those who can't remember the night before. what dream

It also involves how you sleep. During REM sleep, we try to create new memories - researcher Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School said. If we wake up in a dream or immediately after a dream, we can remember it - in other words, we can put it into the long-term memory store.

So if you wake up at night, you may remember what you dreamed of, but if the alarm clock wake you up and shorten REM sleep, you won't be able to keep those memories. The change from sleeping and dreaming to waking up and turning off the alarm clock has prevented the memorization process.

Setting an alarm clock can make you forget your dreams. (Photo: Thuocthang.vn).

4. Why do we dream?

There are many explanations about why people dream. One of them said that dreams act as an evolutionary function, helping test scenarios that may be important to our survival. This may explain the fact that many people often say they dream of being hunted or attacked.

There are also many people who have demonstrated that dreams have the power to promote creative thinking. Paul McCartney, for example, said that "Yesterday" melody came to him in a dream and, according to the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, he dreamed of the structure of the periodic table.

There is an experiment to support this idea. The study showed that people who had a nap included REM sleep scored a high score on the creativity test soon after.

When sleeping, the body's activities take place over 5 stages : sleep, sleep, deep sleep, deep sleep and dream sleep (REM), the stages that take place in order to form a cycle and cycle This is repeated throughout the time since you closed your eyes to sleep the night before to wake up the next morning.

The 5 stages of sleep are divided into 2 groups: REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM / Non-REM sleep (non-rapid eye movement). Specifically, NREM sleep consists of a period of sleep deprivation, sleepiness, deep sleep and very deep sleep. REM sleep only includes the dream period.