The Cognitive Neuroscience of Dreaming: Untangling Dreams and Our Waking Lives

Into the night: the cognitive neuroscience of dreams

Main summary

“Dreams are messages from the deep.” (Dune Part 1) Reflections on dreams abound throughout society, from movies to television to books. But despite being a constant source of fascination, the role of dreams in our lives remains elusive. As recently noted on the TV show. Grey’s Anatomy: “Honestly, no one knows why we dream or why we have nightmares.” While it’s true, neuroscientists are finding innovative new ways to study dreams and how they influence our cognition.

“Understanding how dreams are generated and what their function, if any, might be, is one of the biggest open questions in science right now,” says Remington Mallett of the University of Montreal, who chairs a session at the meeting. annual of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Toronto. “Because we don’t know much about dreams, it is difficult to estimate their full impact on our waking lives. But the current results suggest that dreams do, in fact, influence our waking experiences.”

As presented at CNS 2024, researchers are finding not only novel approaches to exploring dreams and sleep architecture, but also ways to engineer dreams to help people suffering from sleep disorders. In the process, scientists are seeing how perceptions of dreams and sleep quality often differ greatly from the objective measures traditionally used to evaluate them.

Perceptions versus reality

Claudia Picard-Deland posits that dreams are a window to understanding sleep quality. She and her colleagues at the University of Montreal designed studies that wake sleepers many times during the night to determine how the participants perceive their sleep.

“Dreams are not studied much in the context of sleep quality. The focus is more often on objective measures such as brain activity or sleep stage, but I think we need to look more closely at dream activity and its impact on how we perceive sleep.

For people who suffer from insomnia and related disorders, the perception of sleep is a reality, and your dreams could offer possible ways to help shape those perceptions.

In their latest unpublished study, Picard-Deland and her colleagues woke up 20 “good sleepers” about 12 times during the night, representing the four classic stages of sleep at three different times of the night. At each awakening, the researchers asked whether they had been awake or asleep, how deeply they slept, what was the last thing on their mind, and how immersed they felt in their dreams.

They found that sleep misperception (feeling awake even when the electrodes measured that they were asleep) was common among participants, especially in the early, dreamless stages of sleep. Additionally, they found that when participants could remember their dreams, they perceived their sleep as deeper.

“And when they are more immersed in their dreams, feel more physically present, or have more vivid dreams, they wake up feeling like their dream was deeper compared to when they have no or light dream activity,” Picard-Deland says.

The researchers were surprised to see how often participants thought they had been awake when they were actually sleeping (“paradoxical insomnia”) and in the deepest, slow-wave phase of sleep. This work builds on similar previous findings and has important implications for how scientists understand sleep architecture, as well as for people who suffer from insomnia.

As someone who has experienced insomnia all his life, Picard-Deland believes it is crucial for people to realize that they may be sleeping more than they think.

“It helped me to see with my own eyes what was happening in front of me, that the participants were sleeping but still feeling awake.”

Beyond that understanding, this work could have future applications for dream-based sleep rehabilitation. For example, Picard-Deland would love to explore whether dream training, such as teaching people how to experience more immersive lucid dreams, could lead to better insight into sleep quality.

Lucid dreams as a tool

Lucid dreaming is an important part of the work of Saba Al-Youssef, whose team at Sorbonne University is harnessing lucid dreamers’ ability to use facial muscles during sleep as a new data-gathering tool.

“Dreams are a hidden world to which we do not have direct access,” he says. “We rely primarily on dream reports, no matter what study method we use. The ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with us in real time gives us lateral access to dreams, at least knowing when a specific event is happening.”

In a new study with researchers at Northwestern University, Al-Youssef and his colleagues aim to better understand how the brain acts during dreams compared to its behavior when awake. When people are awake and close their eyes, visual content disappears and specific electrical signals are produced. Therefore, researchers wondered what happens in the brain when someone closes their eyes during a dream. They hope to better understand the neural correlates of visual perception during dreams.

The researchers recruited participants who included lucid dreamers with narcolepsy. Over the course of five naps, the researchers instructed participants to close and open their “dream eyes” and indicated this by sniffing once or twice. They then asked people with narcolepsy to report whether they had visual content in each condition by frowning or smiling.

“Surprisingly, we have discovered that closing the ‘dream eyes’ is not always accompanied by a loss of vision, as occurs when we are awake,” says Al-Youssef. “I hope this work helps show how the use of lucid dreaming can be useful in studying dreams and even understanding their function.”

Mallett is excited to see work like this to develop a new methodology for studying dreams.

“I think most scientists are skeptical about studying dreams, so before I tell you what we found, I need to convince you that we can find something,” says Mallett, “that we have the methods and tools to make discoveries.” about dreams.” Dreams.”

Both the work of Picard-Deland and that of Al-Youssef open new avenues of research in the manipulation of dreams through new technologies and with immediate clinical benefits.

“You need to manipulate dreams for good experimentation, and you need to manipulate dreams to reduce nightmares,” he says. “Nightmares are incredibly frustrating for a variety of clinical populations, and there is a great need for approaches to reduce them. Understanding how dreams are formed and how to change them is already opening avenues for efficient nightmare reduction protocols.”

Overall, the work presented at CNS 2024 shows the countless ways dreams affect our waking lives.

“This is not surprising considering that dreams are experiences and your previous experience will always affect your future experiences.”

The work also echoes a fundamental lesson of cognitive neuroscience: that whether we are awake or asleep, our perceptions of the world are nothing more than imperfect creations in our minds.

Symposium

The “Into the Night: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Dreaming” symposium will be held at 1:30 pm EDT on Sunday, April 14, as part of the CNS 2024 Annual Meeting April 13-16, 2024 in Toronto, Canada .

Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS)

CNS is committed to developing mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to providing its 2,000 members worldwide with the latest research to facilitate public, professional and scientific discourse.

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