Wired Magazine takes a look at dreaming.
Dreams are a state of consciousness, an experience that you have when you are asleep, Dr Siclari told WIRED. “When you dream something you have an experience that resembles in many ways a waking experience. You hear things, you see things, you have emotions, and the experience is real, its imaginary of course, but the experience is real.”
Dreams can be identified in a person who is sleeping and in a rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of the sleep cycle. During sleep studies, dreams are indicated by high-frequency electrical activity in the brain. But, it has been shown that similar activity also occurs during non-REM sleep, something that is not well understood and what Siclari and her team hoped to find out more about. In their study, they found that when dreaming was reported by volunteers in both REM and non-REM sleep, a decrease in low-frequency activity occurred in the posterior cortical region, an area at the back of the brain associated with spatial reasoning and attention. The neuroscientists say they were able to correctly predict whether a volunteer was dreaming 92 per cent of the time by monitoring activity in this zone.
Read more at www.wired.co.uk
