The Sleep Blogger
To dream, perchance to remember
If the Sleep Blogger thought you would believe it, he’d start today’s post this way: “While browsing through my newest issue of Current Biology magazine …”
Nobody would buy it, though. Fact is, until today the Sleep Blogger didn’t even know the magazine existed. And even if he had known it, he wouldn’t read it because Current Biology brims with phrases such as “hippocampus-dependent spatial memory task.” Whenever the Sleep Blogger comes across a sentence like that, he lies motionless on the couch until his head stops throbbing.
Still, that phrase with the hippocampus thingy is significant because it appeared in the summary of a study exploring the connection between sleeping, dreaming and memory. Fortunately, other people really do read Current Biology, and one of them wrote a helpful … uh, translation of the findings:
A new study advocates dreaming as a key tool to improving memory and learning skills.
Scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston say the new findings suggest that dreams may be the sleeping brain’s way of telling us that it is hard at work on the process of memory consolidation.
“What’s got us really excited, is that after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information,” explains senior author Robert Stickgold, PhD, Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The study had an elegant simplicity. Ninety-nine people spent an hour trying to navigate a 3-D computer maze. Some were then instructed to lie down for a nap, while others remained awake. A few hours later, everyone took a second shot at the maze. The people who’d stayed awake showed no improvement in their ability to navigate the maze. The nappers who reported no maze-related dreams showed scant improvement. But the people who dreamed about the maze during their naps showed an astounding ten-fold improvement.
So let’s boil this down to elementary logic: Dreaming helps your brain remember things, but you can only dream if you’re sleeping; therefore, if you like stumbling through life with a reputation as a forgetful idiot who can never recall where he put his wallet or remember his children’s birthdays, then yeah, sure, fine, don’t bother getting a good night’s sleep.
Ahem. Not that the Sleep Blogger has trouble with those things.