Understanding Weird Dreams
Oct. 14 -- A study involving peoplewith amnesia, a popular computer game and sleep experts mayhelp explain why dreams are so weird and so important, expertssaid Thursday.
They said people with amnesia who played the popularcomputer game Tetris dreamed about the images it invoked, butcould not remember actually playing the game. And, unlikepeople with normal memories, they never really got any betterat the game.
Subconscious Filing
This shows that when the brain is filing away the memoriesit needs to keep, it has to go through a series of steps, anddreaming is a manifestation of one crucial step, Dr. RobertStickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston,who led the study, said.
Dreams are just the body’s way of clearing out the mental“in-box,” Stickgold said.
“The trick is to move it to the file cabinet and to file itin the right place,” Stickgold said in a telephone interview.
“A lot of REM [rapid eye-movement] dreams, those reallyquirky, strange, bizarre dreams that we have late at night, isthe brain looking for ways to cross-index. It is looking forcross references — does this fit with this? Sometimes it doesand sometimes it doesn’t,” he said.
When it doesn’t fit, the dream seems weird, he said. Whenthe cross-reference is a good one, the brain can reinforce thememory.
One way to test this is to look at people who are missingone of those vital memory steps — people with amnesia.
Tetris on the Brain
Stickgold had noticed that when he skied, he had vividdreams about it.
“When you go downhill skiing, when you go to sleep, you canfeel the turns,” he said. This would make a good test, he said,but added he knew he would never get the OK to takefirst-timers downhill skiing for a scientific experiment.
And then someone mentioned Tetris, a computer game thatuses vivid images of falling and rotating shapes that have tobe manipulated by the player.
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