The Dreaming Brain

dreaming brain dreams, we all experience them yet.

How much do we actually understand about them?

There is yet to be much more research done on

dreams because they are relatively still very mysterious what dreams

are not as crucial for researchers.

Disease states, for example, dreams themselves are very interesting and

understanding them better.

Could help patients with PTSD in which they have recurring

nightmares. This presentation will attempt to help you better understand

what is happening in the brain when we dream and

if dreams have a purpose according to better understand dreams,

we have to take a look at the brain areas

that are active when dreaming.

Additionally, it's important to note that dreaming mainly occurs during

rem sleep, although the prefrontal cortex is mainly inactive, The

venture, medial prefrontal cortex and the parietal occipital temporal junction

are active and dreaming and are thought to actually help

produce dreams.

You could see the ventral medial prefrontal cortex in blue

on the picture on the left and the three look

dumb junction circled in red on the right.

Additionally, the limbic system, motor cortex and visual spatial regions

are active.

one dreaming in the limbic system specifically black and colleagues

discover the important role of the basal lateral in Magdala

and dreaming.

They compared control patients to people with her bitch with

disease. This disease causes leeches in the amygdala, which you

can see in the picture on the right.

The top picture is a brain of a healthy brain

compared to the pictures underneath the patient allegiance to the

amygdala. So patients that have damaged their Magdala had less

unpleasant and emotionally negative dreams, more positive emotions shorter, simpler

and less intense threats in their dreams, which you can

see demonstrated in the graphs below.

And this is because the Magdala plays a role in

the intensity of emotions and dreams interestingly dreaming of a

movement actually elicits activation in the sensory motor cortex which

is labeled below in the dark blue and red.

So Dressler and colleagues asked lucid dreamers to clench their

fists while dreaming because lucid dreamers can relatively control their

dreams and their aware that they're dreaming.

This led to increased blood flow and oxygenation to the

sensory murder area.

However, the dreamers did not clench their fists in real

life because of the brain stem inducing muscle paralysis, which

actually helps you not act out your dreams in real

life. So pictures see shows up from MRI scans of

the dreamer clenching their fists and how I activated the

sensory motor cortex in comparison to picture a in which

the person clench their fist when they were awake.

So what about the functions of dreams?

Well, Malinowski and Horton found that earlier in the night

dreams help consolidate our episodic memory and they're more focused

on our recent waking memories.

While later in the night dream content is more emotional

and bizarre memory and emotions tied together because rem sleep

consolidates emotional memories.

So walker described dreaming as overnight overnight therapy because there

is no your adrenaline, which is an anxiety related molecule.

This helps your dreams to sort through the heavy emotions

that you experience throughout the day.

Dreaming also plays a role in creativity and problem solving.

So in summary um dreaming, it's an emotional processing and

it activates the limbic system in sensory motor area.

These studies help broaden our knowledge on dreams.

However future studies need to focus on how to better

improve research on dream content and it's possible roles in

therapy. Thank you so much for listening and hearing my

sources.

The Dreaming Brain

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