Skip to main content

Scientists may have found the part of the brain that enables lucid dreaming



People who are aware, and often in control, during their dreams have one thing in common, researchers have found.
Do a quick Google search for lucid dreaming - the phenomenon where someone is aware during their dreams - and you'll quickly be overwhelmed with tips and techniques for unlocking the ability.
Despite lucid dreaming being relatively rare in most people, knowing when you're dreaming and potentially even being able to change the course of your dreams is clearly desirable to a lot of people. 
Now scientists from Germany believe they may have found the neurological key to the ability. After scanning the brains of regular dreamers and those who are frequently lucid, they've found that the region of the brain that enables self reflection is larger among lucid dreamers.
"Our results indicate that self-reflection in everyday life is more pronounced in persons who can easily control their dreams," said Elisa Filevich, a research at the Centre for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who was one of the leaders of the research, in a press release.

Although research has previously shown that people who lucid dream appear to have more pronounced awareness of their own thought processes, known as metacognition, this is one of the first studies to explore the link between the two at a neural level.
To do this, the team asked volunteers to complete a questionnaire on their lucid dreaming ability, and then split them into two groups depending on whether they were highly lucid, or never or rarely lucid during dreams.
The team then performed structural and functional MRI scans on the two different groups to compare the volume of different regions of their brains.
What they found was that participants who were highly lucid during dreams had larger anterior prefrontal cortexes, which is the region of the brain that controls conscious cognitive processes and plays an important role in our ability to self reflect.
The team also took scans while the participants were solving waking self awareness tests. The scans revealed that lucid dreamers also had more brain activity happening in their prefrontal cortex than regular dreamers. This suggests that the same brain region is connected to both abilities. Their research has now beenpublished in The Journal of Neuroscience.
"Our results indicate that self-reflection in everyday life is more pronounced in persons who can easily control their dreams," said Filevich in the release. 
The researchers are now eager to find out whether these self awareness skills can be taught. Their next study will attempt to teach volunteers to lucid dream, and then see whether their self-reflection also improves as a result.
As someone who’s had plenty of lucid dreams myself, I’m still not entirely sure of the appeal. All the dreams that I'm lucid during, and particularly those I have some control over, are frustrating and exhausting and feel more like a mental marathon than rest. 
But I can’t deny that it’s fascinating to discover more about how our brains work - both when we’re awake, and during sleep. Even if it is occasionally nice to have a little escape from awareness.
You can find out more about the science of lucid dreaming thanks to the guys over at AsapSCIENCE.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Einstein’s Lost Theory Describes a Universe Without a Big Bang

Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929.  Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology. In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s  general theory of relativity  was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the  entire universe . For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein. Einstein began by applying his  field equations of gravitation  to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity  to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—...
Post a Comment
Read more

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone  —  scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what  —  you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published  in  Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise  told  Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...
Post a Comment
Read more

First light-bending calculator designed with metamaterials

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of  metamaterials . These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver " invisibility cloaks " that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta  at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the  old idea of analogue computing . Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The  slide rule  is one example...
Post a Comment
Read more