Humans spend a few third of their lives sleeping, and while most of us dream, some people remember their dreams higher than others. But scientists still know surprisingly little about why and the way we experience dreams.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we study latest research from a sleep lab in France that has opened up a option to learn more about people by talking to them as they dream.
It is difficult to review people after they are dreaming. Although researchers can accurately tell when an individual is asleep by utilizing electrodes to sense their brain activity, there isn't a neurological marker for dreams. This means you simply need to ask someone about their dreams while they're awake. It is unimaginable to know after they actually dreamed, or what was really happening, because they could have forgotten the main points.
Dream researchers realized within the Eighties that a special group of individuals could help open a window into the dream world: dreamers. These people have the power to comprehend that they're dreaming and still asleep, and so they can sometimes control what happens of their dreams. The experiences of lucid dreamers have shown this.During REM sleep, they could move their eyes back and forth to inform researchers that they're dreaming.
Researcher Başak Türker and his colleagues on the Paris Brain Institute desired to see if lucid dreamers could go one step further: to receive and reply to information while they were dreaming.
We thought that they may also concentrate on the environment they're sleeping in and might have the ability to get information at the identical time.
They recruited a dreamer from the institute's sleep lab to conduct some experiments, and His theory worked. He was in a position to communicate with them: he smiled after they asked if he liked chocolate, and he smiled after they asked if he liked football.
They then conducted further experiments with non-lucid dreamers to see if one could communicate with the waking world while dreaming. And it seems That they can.
To learn more about communication in dreams, take heed to an interview with Başak Türker and Lionel Cavicchioli, health and medicine editors of The Conversation in France. Talk weekly The podcast
A transcript of this episode is now available.