{"id":51420,"date":"2021-10-17T07:41:36","date_gmt":"2021-10-17T11:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=51420"},"modified":"2021-10-21T18:39:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T22:39:13","slug":"science-behind-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science Behind Dreams: The Sleeping Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What exactly are dreams? What is the science behind dreams? How can scientists research them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his book <em>Why We Sleep, <\/em>Matthew Walker discusses dreams from a scientific point of view. He goes over older theories related to dreaming and explains what happens during the REM cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here is what Walker has to say on the science behind dreams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Are Dreams?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Dreaming is a bizarre experience. You\u2019re unconscious, but you perceive intense vivid sensations and hallucinate things that aren\u2019t there. You feel like you\u2019re moving in the world, but your muscles are in a state of paralysis. You remember faces and memories that you haven\u2019t thought about for years, maybe decades. You have no control over your emotions, swinging from intense rage and jealousy to exuberance. Finally, when you wake up, you promptly forget everything. <strong>If you experienced all of this while awake, you\u2019d think you were having a psychosis episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s not surprising then that dreaming has had a complicated history. Walker explains that in the ancient past, Egyptians and Greeks wondered if dreams were divine gifts from gods.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Freud helped dispel this myth, firmly centering dreaming within the human brain. He considered dreams as expressions of repressed desires, and he built a psychological movement around <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/how-to-interpret-dreams\/\">interpreting dreams<\/a> as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The critical flaw in Freudian analysis was its unprovability\u2014the interpretation methods were so subjective that different approaches yielded different results, and there was no strict hypothesis that was testable.<\/li><li>Furthermore, the interpretations were horoscopically vague, thus seeming full of significance but not providing any practical insight (for example, \u201cyour dream is reminding you of how little time you have to do all the things you want to do.\u201d Pretty much everyone feels this way.)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>The Latest Dream Theories<\/strong><br><br>Since Freud\u2019s time, there have been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2021\/may\/14\/weird-dreams-train-us-for-the-unexpected-says-new-theory\">several theories about the purpose of dreaming<\/a>, such as memory consolidation (dreams are replays of waking life), activation synthesis (dreams enable us to make connections between memories), and emotion regulation (dreams are a manifestation of, and some sort of therapy for, our emotions). Answering the question of why we dream isn\u2019t straightforward because dreams may serve many purposes. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discovermagazine.com\/mind\/why-do-we-dream-science-offers-a-few-possibilities\">As one researcher puts it<\/a>, \u201cAsking what dreams are for is like asking what waking thought is for.\u201d&nbsp;<br><br>Two of the newer theories that emerged in 2021 are:<br><br><strong>Network exploration to understand possibilities (NEXTUP). <\/strong>In <a href=\"https:\/\/wwnorton.com\/books\/9781324002833\"><em>When Brains Dream<\/em><\/a>, sleep researchers Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold theorize that dreams, and not just the sleep state, are <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sciencemag.org\/books\/2021\/02\/08\/when-brains-dream\/\">important for memory consolidation<\/a>, allowing dreamers to create links between themes and memories and using narrative structures to help the brain figure out which of these associations may be useful.<br><br><strong>Overfitted brain hypothesis. <\/strong>Another theory suggests that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2021\/may\/14\/weird-dreams-train-us-for-the-unexpected-says-new-theory\">dreams in all their strangeness give the human brain a more well-rounded view of the world<\/a>. This was inspired by artificial intelligence, which tends to have a bias toward the data it\u2019s trained on. The human brain is trained to process similar data every day.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Science of Dreaming<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>To understand the science of dreams, we must understand the concept of REM sleep: most vivid dreaming happens during REM sleep (though NREM sleep has some vague non-vivid dreaming, like \u201cI was thinking about clouds\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>During REM dreaming, Walker says that your visual, motor, memory, and emotional <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-are-the-regions-of-the-brain\/\">areas of the brain<\/a> are active. Your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-does-the-prefrontal-cortex-do-in-the-brain\/\">prefrontal cortex<\/a> (governing rationality) is muted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He says it may even be possible to predict what you\u2019re dreaming about through fMRI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>To build a profile of your brain, you look at different images while awake, and the fMRI signature is captured.<\/li><li>Then as you dream, your dreaming fMRI is matched to your awake fMRI profiles, predicting what you\u2019re currently looking at while dreaming.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>We often think about the meanings of our dreams. Do dreams merely replay events of the day, or do they reflect our emotional concerns?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>A study showed that only a small fraction (1-2%) of dreams replay the literal events of the day.&nbsp;<\/li><li>A greater fraction (~45%) reflect our underlying emotional worries we have while awake.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>The Ethics of Dream Research<\/strong><br><br>Advances in dream research have now made it possible to predict and, perhaps, eventually control dreams. While the pursuit of new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/why-knowledge-is-important\/\">knowledge is important<\/a>, developments in the field of dream research do raise some questions and concerns:<br><br><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theneuroethicsblog.com\/2018\/12\/the-ethics-of-dream-recording.html\"><strong>The importance of informed consent<\/strong><\/a>\u2014a study participant may be able to give her consent while fully conscious, but won\u2019t have any control over what researchers could access in her brain while she\u2019s asleep. Participants could unwittingly reveal highly personal and sensitive information that they would not have revealed while awake.&nbsp;<br><br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.psychologytoday.com\/us\/blog\/dreaming-in-the-digital-age\/202102\/what-are-the-ethics-dreaming\"><strong>The ethics of dream manipulation<\/strong><\/a>\u2014dreams operate outside the realm of normal ethics, but what happens when subjects are manipulated into dreaming something they don\u2019t want to dream about? We could argue that tricking someone into doing something in waking life is unethical, but tricking someone into doing something in their dreams\u2014which theoretically has no impact on real life\u2014lies outside any ethical or moral boundaries.&nbsp;<br><br>It\u2019s thus critical for scientists to establish policies to protect study participants, ensuring that they\u2019re fully informed about experiments and the subsequent use of their data.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What exactly are dreams? What is the science behind dreams? How can scientists research them? In his book Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker discusses dreams from a scientific point of view. He goes over older theories related to dreaming and explains what happens during the REM cycle. Here is what Walker has to say on the science behind dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":51835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,160],"tags":[98],"class_list":["post-51420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-science","tag-why-we-sleep","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Science Behind Dreams: The Sleeping Brain - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Do you ever wonder how dreams work? In his book Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker takes a look at the science behind dreams. Here&#039;s an overview.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Science Behind Dreams: The Sleeping Brain\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Do you ever wonder how dreams work? In his book Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker takes a look at the science behind dreams. Here&#039;s an overview.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Shortform Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-10-17T11:41:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-10-21T22:39:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/wordpress.shortform.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/ship-and-sky.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1144\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"650\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Hannah Aster\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Hannah Aster\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Hannah Aster\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/f39f52830e4f7039a16e45d12354542f\"},\"headline\":\"The Science Behind Dreams: The Sleeping Brain\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-10-17T11:41:36+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-10-21T22:39:13+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\"},\"wordCount\":883,\"commentCount\":0,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/ship-and-sky.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Why We Sleep\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Psychology\",\"Science\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/\",\"name\":\"The Science Behind Dreams: The Sleeping Brain - Shortform Books\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/science-behind-dreams\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/ship-and-sky.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-10-17T11:41:36+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-10-21T22:39:13+00:00\",\"description\":\"Do you ever wonder how dreams work? 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