Anyways, this patient pulled out a gun and shot him point blank in the chest and in the head. One day when I was working in the hospital, one of our professors of otolaryngology was seeing patients in his clinic, and one of these patients became extremely angry with what the doc and this doctor I just have to say, in its absolute truth, he was just this amazingly wonderful man, incredible teacher, incredible person, somebody we all aspired to be in our own lives. So dreams tend to become more like a kaleidoscope.
We have hundreds, thousands of small problems. But in the regular life of people that are not homeless or in the middle of the war, we do not have one major problem. Like a person that is attacked by a shark will have nightmares about sharks and they will not be very metaphorical in the beginning. So that gives a strength to the notion that dreams are simulations of potential behaviors and also of potential outcomes. What we do know is that when you dream of performing a certain task, you become better at that. Now, how much of that is really related to dreaming? I would say this is a frontier of neuroscience at this moment. And this will become a social snowball because you're going to treat other people worse and they will react to that. But if you are deprived of REM sleep, you will. If you had a bad adverse encounter yesterday, it doesn't mean you need to wake up cranky, irritated. A lot of what REM sleep does is to reset our emotions. So people that are deprived of sleep, they start to accumulate cognitive deficits. So it's a way to stimulate potential futures. Maybe they're good strategies, maybe they're good behaviors. What dreams allow us to do is to probe things that may be a little crazy, but maybe they work. When you don't have norepinephrine, it's the other way around. It's like a decision making that is totally biased in one direction. So when you're-, when you have a lot of norepinephrine, for example, when you are alert and paying attention and stressed, you know, you will only do one thing and all the other things won't be done. Keep dreaming.' And there's another thing going on, which is during REM sleep, there is no release of norepinephrine, one very important neurotransmitter for neuronal communication and for memory formation. So you see, a purple giraffe, you say, 'Okay, it's purple giraffe. When this is deactivated, we basically accept everything.
But most of the prefrontal cortex is deactivated, and this is the part of the brain that produces censorship that tells us, don't do this, that inhibits behaviors. One is the nearly complete deactivation of the prefrontal cortex in some portions of the frontal part of the brain that are still active during REM sleep. There are reasons that are very concrete and specific for that disinhibition. So people that are chronically sleep deprived, they're getting a lot of damage, emotional damage, cognitive damage and actually health damage from not having proper REM sleep every night.Ībsolutely. But in our contemporary society, it's pretty much out of the map. We have access to an inner world of brain representations of mental creatures, which is something that was tremendously important throughout our history and prehistory probably. And this reactivation of memories produces an internal reality. And this is when our brains become really, really engaged in the reactivation of memories.
You know, I need to pay some bills or something like that, but not a movie, not something with a strong visual impression. People that are woken from that state, they will report some vague thoughts. When you're in that state, you don't really dream much.
Then we go into phase three, this so-called slow wave sleep.
#Big ben alarm clock full#
But those dreams and little clips they're not really full fledged dreams. This is when we are dozing and then we start dreaming. In each cycle you want to go four different states. When you have a full night of sleep, you go through four or five full cycles of sleep. This is a really good question because sleep is not a single thing, a monolithic thing.