Top: Patient in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. Bottom: Activity in the motor cortex during the movement of the hands while awake (left) and during a dreamed movement (right). Blue areas indicate the activity during a movement of the right hand, which is clearly demonstrated in the left brain hemisphere, while red regions indicate the corresponding left-hand movements in the opposite brain hemisphere. (Credit: © MPI of Psychiatry)The content of the dreams and how the images form in our minds when we are asleep are still a mystery, but a group of scientists from the Max Planck Institute working with colleagues from the Charite hospital in Berlin have been working on this issue. They have been able to analyze the activity of the brain during dreaming.
The scientists did experiments where lucid dreamers, people who are able to recognize the content of the dreams clearly and alter it, were introduced into a magnetic resonance imaging machine to measure the brain activity during the dream. They found that this activity matched the activity of the brain when the person is awake. The person did a movement in the dream and the image from the machine showed the brain activity matched the image of when the person executed the same movement, but in a "real state of wakefulness".
When a person is asleep, they are the only ones who can actually report whether or not they are dreaming. Scientists cannot analyze brain activity related to the content of the dream, however, with the help of the magnetic resonance imaging they can tell where the activity is specifically located during the dreaming.
The scientists from the MPI of Psychiatry in Munich, the Charite hospital in Berlin, and the MPI of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig used the ability of lucid dreamers to dream consciously for their research. The dreamers had to be aware of what they were dreaming in the magnetic resonance imaging machine and report that they were in that "lucid" state by moving their eyes. Then, they were asked to dream that they were clenching their left fist and then their right one for ten seconds.
The fist clenching enabled the scientists to know when the person reached the REM state, when the dream is perceived clearly, with the help of the person's electroencephalogram (EEG). During the dream, a region of the sensorimotor cortex of the brain, area responsible for movement, was activated. They noticed that as the dreamer imagined the clenching of their fist, the sensorimotor cortex reacted in a similar way to when the person actually clenched their fist in real life.
The fact that the brain's reaction during dreaming is similar to those in real life shows that measuring the content of dreams is possible.
"With this combination of sleep EEGs, imaging methods and lucid dreamers, we can measure not only simple movements during sleep but also the activity patterns in the brain during visual dream perceptions," says Martin Dresler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry.
The researchers were able to confirm the data obtained using MR imaging in another subject using a different technology. With the help of near-infrared spectroscopy, they also observed increased activity in a region of the brain that plays an important role in the planning of movements. "Our dreams are therefore not a 'sleep cinema' in which we merely observe an event passively, but involve activity in the regions of the brain that are relevant to the dream content," explains Michael Czisch, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry.
What interested me about this article was that it is about an enigmatic issue scientists have researched and researched and have yet to solve. Dreams are such a mystery to everybody that it makes us crave for knowledge to be able to understand them. With this experiment from the MPI of Psychiatry, scientists know that the brain reacts to the action that is occurring in the dream in the mind of the individual. I can draw connections to my life from this article because, even though I don't always remember what I dream, I know that my brain reacts to the activities I do in my dreams, for example clenching my fists. This article is related to the area of interaction Health and Social Education because it talks about how scientists are getting closer to understanding how dreams work and how the brain works when you are dreaming certain things.
