On the flip side, other parts of the brain (the frontal and prefrontal cortices, which are involved with our ability to plan, think through things and apply logic and order) are less active during dreaming compared with other parts of sleep and wakefulness (that research also goes back to the late 1990s). And more recent work from Baird’s group suggests that areas of the brain known to be involved in visual processing (the regions that appear to allow us to register colors, motion, and faces) are active during dreaming. Studies going back to the 1990s suggest the amygdala (a part of our brain that plays a role in emotional processing) appear to be very active during dreaming. “And it does match the psychology in some interesting ways,” says Benjamin Baird, PhD, a researcher at the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose work focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms of consciousness. Researchers have measured brain activity during sleep and during dreaming. ( Erin Wamsley, PhD, an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, explains all of those studies in further depth in a review article in a 2014 issue of Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports.)Īnd more research suggests that dreaming does actually help us problem solve.Ī set of experiments conducted by Wamsley’s and Stickgold’s group (when Wamsley was at Harvard) showed that when a group of 99 individuals were given the task of navigating a complex maze, those whose performance on the task improved the most when re-tested after a five-hour period were those individuals given the opportunity to take a nap - and more specifically those who reported dreaming about the maze during that nap - compared to when they were simply awake during that time (even if they reported thinking about the maze during that period of being awake).ĭuring dreaming, the visual and emotional processing areas of the brain are active Other research shows that we are more likely to remember something if we dream about it. Several studies show (what nearly everyone has probably experienced on their own) that our waking experiences show up in our dreams. “It might be that you need to bring that sleep-dependent memory processing into consciousness to be able to solve those kinds of problems that require the development of a plan or a narrative or a plot,” Stickgold says - that you need to dream to do that kind of thinking. But that type of narrative construction (building a story) still requires us to be consciously aware, Stickgold says - which is one feature of dreams. That’s what our brains can’t do in the background when we’re awake. There are certain questions that come up for which we plot a potential course of action or think through a future scenario to solve, Stickgold explains. triloks / Getty Images/iStockphoto The dreaming brain can build stories better than a brain that’s awake (And there’s a whole lot of evidence to support the idea that sleep makes learning and memory storing possible.)Īnd it might be that dreaming plays a role in that process, Stickgold says - “where the brain is trying to solve problems and complete processes that were going on during waking that it - in its waking hours - didn’t complete.” Even the really weird dreams may just be part of the brain’s process of elimination-approach to problem solving, experts say. Our brains need offline time for processing and learning new things - and they do this during sleep.
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