What Dreams Are Made Of
Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind's secrets
"From my perspective, dreaming is just thinking in a very different biochemical state," says Deirdre Barrett, who teaches psychology at Harvard and is editor of the journal Dreaming. The threads can be "just as complex as waking thought and just as dull. They are overwhelmingly visual, and language is less important, and logic is less important."
I am a traveler carrying one light bag and looking for a place to spend the night. I...discover a hostel of a sort in a large indoor space big enough to house a gymnasium. I find a spot near a corner and prepare for bed. I think to myself, "Luckily, I have my high-tech pillow." I take out of my bag a light, flat panel about 8 by 10 inches and the thickness of a thick piece of cardboard. "It works by applying a voltage," I say. "There's a new kind of material which fluffs up when you apply a voltage." On the face of the panel is a liquid-crystal display with two buttons, one labeled "on" and one labeled "off." I touch the "on" button with my index finger, and the flat panel magically inflates to the dimensions of a fluffy pillow. I lay it down on the ground and comfortably go to sleep.
Chuck, scientist (from Dreambank.net)
If Chuck's experience is an example of logic gone to sleep, no wonder dreamers so often wake up shouting, "Eureka!" Indeed, history is filled with examples of inspiration that blossomed during sleep and eventually led to inventions or works of art or military moves. Exactly what happens to inspire creativity is unclear, but the new technology is providing clues.
Crazy smart. Brain scans performed on people in REM sleep, for example, have shown that even as certain brain centers turn on--the emotional seat of the brain and the part that processes all visual inputs are wide awake--one vital area goes absolutely dormant: the systematic and clear-thinking prefrontal cortex, where caution and organization reside. "This can explain the bizarreness you see in dreams, the crazy kind of sense that your brain is ignoring the usual ways that you put things together," says Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. "This is what you want in a state in which creativity is enhanced. Creativity is nothing more and nothing less than putting memories together in a way that they never have been before."
Putting memories together is also an essential part of learning; people integrate the memory of new information, be it how to tie shoelaces or conjugate French verbs, with existing knowledge. Does dreaming help people learn? No one knows--but some sort of boost seems to happen during sleep. Many studies by sleep researchers have shown that people taught a new task performed it better after a night of sleep.
A study of how quickly dreamers solve problems supports Stickgold's theory that the sleeping mind can be quite nimble and inventive. Participants were asked to solve scrambled word puzzles after being awakened during both the REM phase of sleep and the less active non-REM phase. Their performance improved by 32 percent when they worked on the puzzles coming out of REM sleep, which told researchers that that phase is more conducive to fluid reasoning. During non-REM sleep, it appears, our more cautious selves kick into gear.
advertisement
