A lot of people invest much value in dreams. Many claims that dreaming is some kind of mystical doorway from which we view our inner-most feelings and memories. Some claim dreams predict the future or are Nature’s way of forcing us to explore what we would prefer to remain hidden. Others, like Dr. J. Allan Hobson, pours cold water on those theories and makes the bold claim that dreams are nothing more than a nightly tune-up session for the day ahead.

From the NY Times:

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

Recurrent dreams happen to a huge number of people, but why? Is it a glitch in our brain or is there some deeper meaning? I can’t say as I’ve had many recurrent dreams in my life, though I do have recurrent themes, but that’s something else entirely. Psychology Today reveals some new research into the seldom explored area of human consciousness.

Psychology Today:

Originally proposed by Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo, the Threat Simulation Theory, or “TST”, holds that dreaming serves a biologically adaptive function because it allowed our evolutionary ancestors to simulate problem-solving strategies for genuine, waking life threats. Antonio Zadra, Sophie Desjardins, and Eric Marcotte of the University of Montreal, neatly summarise the central argument of TST this way: “By giving rise to a full-scale hallucinatory world of subjective experience during sleep, the dream production mechanism provides an ideal and safe environment for such sustained practice by selecting threatening waking events and simulating them repeatedly in various combinations.” Although Revonsuo’s theory was initially postulated for dreams in general, it has special relevance for recurrent dreams, argue Zadra and his colleagues, because these should capture the most salient threat themes jeopardising reproductive success.

Last night, 60 Minutes had a segment about the sleeping habits of Americans. It was one of the worst segments I’ve ever seen on 60 Minutes, presenting research that was downright ridiculous. If you didn’t see it, I’ve got a clip embedded after the break. Beyond the lame research they offered, 60 Minutes also made the claim, which I’ve heard numerous times over the past few years, that “American’s are sleeping less than ever.” 

However, as reported by Robin Lloyd, senior editor at LiveScience, this whole “we don’t get enough sleep” claim, is bunk.

Americans get about 8 hours of sleep a night, possibly more in recent years, according to the University of Maryland study, which counters annual polls conducted by the non-profit National Sleep Foundation that show we get only 7 hours nightly or less. The foundation, however, is funded in part by drug companies that make sleep aids.

Be sure to read the article if you’d like to be informed on the topic. Meanwhile, enjoy this clip from last night’s bizarro 60 Minutes.
60 Minutes – Science of Sleep:

I’m not really sure if I want to watch my dreams via some kind of Tivo device, but it appears humanity may be moving in that direction faster than anticipated. The British journal Nature reports on the latest breakthrough by a team of scientists at UC Berkley:

The researchers said they had been able to decode signals in a key part of the brain to identify images seen by a volunteer, according to their study.

How did they do it?

The tool used by the University of California at Berkeley neuroscientists is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive scanner that detects minute flows of blood within the brain, thus highlighting which cerebral areas are triggered by light, sound and touch.

Was luck involved?

They notched up a 92 percent success rate with one volunteer, and accuracy was 72 percent in the other. The probability of this happening on the basis of chance — i.e. the computer picking the right image out of the 120 — is only 0.8 percent.

How much longer until Brain-TiVo?

Within 30 or 50 years, advances could raise fears about breach of privacy and authoritarian abuse of the kind that dog biotechnology today, the authors say.
“No-one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent,” they say.