![]() ![]() “It’s not a huge, dramatic effect but it certainly seems like paying attention to your dreams can have positive effects,” says Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep. For starters, a century of experience with talk therapy has shown that far from benefitting from forgetting all of our dreams, we often get a great deal out of reflecting on and analyzing them. But most contemporary dream theorists believe things are not quite so simple. ![]() “We dream to forget,” wrote Nobel laureate Francis Crick in 1984.Ĭrick, who is best known and most celebrated as the co-discoverer of DNA, improbably became something of a leading thinker - or at least leading provocateur - in dream theory, and what was colloquially known as his “garbage disposal theory” of dreaming attracted a lot of believers into the 1990s. Most of this evanescent imagery - an estimated 90% - we don’t recall, which is consistent with the idea of dreaming as purging. Justice Ginsburg and the bear, say, may come to mind as your brain examines and discards a scrap of news it picked up about the Supreme Court and the Department of the Interior. MORE: How Dream Therapy Can Change Your Life As that data streams by on the computer screen of the sleeping mind, some of it gets snatched up and randomly stitched into the crazy quilt of dreams, which often only vaguely resemble the literal content of the information. The hippocampus is then cleared to gather more the next day, while the neocortex decides what to transfer to long-term memory and what to discard. Researchers had long suspected that that process, if it exists, plays out between the hippocampus - which controls memory - and the neocortex, which governs higher order thought.Ī 2007 study at the Max Planck Medical Institute in Heidelberg, Germany helped confirm that theory: working with anesthetized mice, the researchers found that as the neocortex fires during sleep, it signals various regions in the hippocampus to upload whatever information they’ve been holding in short-term storage. The least glamorous explanation for any dream is that it serves as a sort of data dump - a clearing of the day’s useless memories and a caching of the valuable ones.
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