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Dream zone found in brain

23.04.2017

A large area of the posterior cortex changes its electrical activity as soon as we start dreaming.

Sleep is divided into several stages: REM sleep (REM sleep, or rapid eye movement phase) and non-REM sleep (which, in turn, consists of several more phases). For a long time it was believed that dreams come only in REM sleep - it’s not for nothing that the eyes move during it.

However, over time, it turned out that dreams are dreamed not only in REM sleep, but also in slow sleep (for example, a person may dream of something, although according to the electroencephalogram (EEG), he did not have any REM sleep at all).

Neuroscientists have long been trying to figure out whether dreams obey some laws, which areas of the brain turn on the dream mode, etc. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison write that they were able not only to find a region in the brain that “turns on” dreams, but also predict when a person will dream something. The experiment involved several dozen people who were asked to sleep in a laboratory with a small device for recording electrical brain waves on their heads. Volunteers were woken up at different times, asked if they dreamed anything and if they could remember any details of it, and their answers were compared with what the EEG showed.

It turned out that dreams have a well-defined electrorhythmic "handwriting": when a person began to dream about something, the intensity of low-frequency waves dropped, and the intensity of high-frequency waves, on the contrary, increased, and this happened in a certain area in the posterior lobes of the cortex. "Dream" changes in the electrical activity of the brain took place not only during REM sleep, but during non-REM sleep as well. By monitoring the “dream zone,” neuroscientists have been able to predict fairly accurately whether a person is dreaming or not. By the way, it turned out that dreams accompany 95% of REM sleep and 71% of slow sleep.

The area of the cortex associated with dreams turned out to be quite extensive, and in itself it consists of a number of areas with certain functions. The content of sleep depended on the area in which the electrorhythmic changes occurred: for example, if the intensity of high frequencies increased in Wernicke's zone, which is involved in the interpretation of speech, then the awakened person then told that someone was saying something in his dream.

For the time being, it would probably be premature to assert a causal relationship between dreams and the activity of the "sleepy cortex" - it may be that the change in the frequency of brain waves does not so much trigger the mechanism of dreams, but only accompanies it. One way or another, the more we know what happens in the brain during dreams, the more we will learn not only about the nature of sleep, but also about the nature of consciousness in general.

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