Dreaming beyond the brain

 

The new science of dreaming tells us the following: 

-          Almost everyone dreams, every night.

-          Humans average six dreams (or dream sequences) every night, whether or not they remember

-          Dreaming, or at least some form of mentation, is going on in all stages of sleep, not just the rapid-eye movement state discovered in a Chicago laboratory in 1953. [1] 

-          A part of the brain that becomes highly active in dreaming (the inferior right parietal cortex) is also involved in creating structures for our perceptions, in both physical and imaginal space.

-          The behavior of the waking brain is quite similar to that of the dreaming brain during creative states, as when jazz performers enter a riff of improvisation. [2]

-          “A type of spatial and temporal binding underlies dreaming that is analogous to the perceptual binding thought to underlie waking consciousness.” [3]

While cognitive neuroscientists have tended to dismiss dreams as nonsense, new studies even within that field support the idea that dreaming plays a critical role in growing learning skills and consolidating memory. “Dreaming about newly learned material enhances subsequent recall of that material.”[4]

There are excellent books available for those who want to know more about the neurobiology of dreaming, ranging from Andrea Rock’s very readable and accessible The Mind at Night to the hardcore technical papers collected in the three volumes of The New Science of Dreaming.

However, while brain science tells us important things about the quality of our reception, it no more tells us how our dreams are made than pulling apart a television monitor can show you how and where a movie produced and how it travels from a network to your screen.

Notes

1.This is not a consensus, however; some researchers, such as Harvard’s J. Allan Hobson, continue to insist on a tight association between dreaming and REM sleep.

2. Charles J. Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: an fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation” in The Public Library of Science Journal, vol. 3 no. 2 (February 2008) pp. 1-9.

3. Tore A. Nielsen, and Stenstrom, Philippe, “What are the memory sources of dreaming?” in Nature 437:27 (October 2005) p. 1287.

4. ibid p. 1289.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss