Dreams, memory and learning

Dreams have been linked to prophesies and the unconscious welling up to the surface or dismissed as the brain's equivalent of a PC's screensaver but new research by scientists at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston suggests that they may play an important part in learning and memory. The researchers studied 99 people who spent an hour training on a virtual maze. After their initial training the participants either had a nap or took part in quiet activities but stayed awake. When they attempted the maze again the participants who had stayed awake or who had had a nap but had not dreamt about the maze showed very little signs of improvement. However, those people who had dreamt about the maze showed 10 times the level of improvement of the other participants. The participants who dreamt about the maze were the ones who had done particularly poorly in their initial training.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/dreams-are-key-to-memory/13157.html

Dreams, delusions and psychosis

Researchers at the European Science Foundation have been discussing the latest research on dreams. They looked into a phenomenon called lucid dreaming in which people are aware that they are dreaming. They found it creates distinct patterns of electrical activity in the brain similar to the patterns made by psychosis. In lucid dreaming the brain is said to be in a dissociated state having lost conscious control over mental processes such as logical thinking and emotional reaction - again something that also occurs in psychosis. People suffering from nightmares can sometimes be treated by training them to dream lucidly so that they can consciously wake up, something it is hoped could be applied to people with psychosis. Dreaming is thought to have emerged to enable early humans to rehearse responses to the many dangerous events they faced in real life and some researchers think that paranoid delusions might occur because of a replay of this "threat response rehearsal," during waking life. However, not all dreams are threatening and other scientists see them as part of a learning process consolidating information acquired during the day. This theory is supported by the fact that people often remember things better the day after they learnt them i.e. after a night's sleep, than shortly afterwards.

You can find out more about this research at

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090728184831.htm

To sleep, perchance to dream

Scientists are still unsure about why we dream and why we dream about certain things rather than others. A series of studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University looked into the significance people give to dreams and found that most people believed they contain important, hidden truths. One study of 149 students in the U.S., India and South Korea asked them to rate different theories about dreams. In all three countries an overwhelming majority of the students believed that dreams revealed hidden truths about themselves or the world. In another study 182 commuters at a Boston train station were given four different scenarios about things that had happened the night before a plane trip: that the nation's security threat had been raised to orange, that they had consciously thought about their plane crashing, that a real plane crash had occured on the route they were about to take or that they had dreamt about a plane crash. Dreaming about a plane crash was more likely to make people change their travel plans. A third study asked 270 people in the U.S. to remember a dream they had had about someone they knew. People gave more importance to pleasant dreams about people they liked than about people they didn't and gave more importance to unpleasant dreams about people they disliked. Finally, when people were asked about their religious dreams religious people were inclined to take seriously any dream involving God, whereas agnostic people only took the dream seriously if God had asked them to do something pleasant.

You can find out more about this research at

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090217125544.htm