14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Munich, Germany-based Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPIP) say that the human brain shows the same activation patterns in motor control regions when we sleep and dream as we do when we are awake.
This may be one of the main reasons why certain dreams may appear too real to many. If people envision running during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, the brain responds by activating regions responsible for controlling movement in the same patterns as if the subjects were awake and running.
This was recently determined in a study that used both functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to image the human brain. All 6 participants in the study were trained to be lucid dreamers.
Studying what goes on during sleep is very tricky because individuals tend to forget what they dream. At the same time, they cannot control what they are experiencing, so whatever readings experts managed to take cannot be correlated to anything.
This is precisely why the MPIP team used lucid dreamers. People trained to do this can fall asleep and then control what they are seeing according to instructions. All participants in the new study were allowed to sleep in either an fMRI machine or an NIRS scanner.
Only 2 of 6 managed to control their dreams in the noisy environments. All had been previously instructed to envision clenching either their left or their right hand, and to let researchers know they were doing this by moving their eyes left and right twice during sleep.
MPIP neuroscientists Martin Dresler and Michael Czisch, and their team, paid close attention to the two test subjects who managed to fall asleep and experience lucid dreams. They then correlated fMRI and NPIR results with what the individuals were dreaming.
The research group found that neural activation patterns in regions of the brain controlling hand movements looked just as they did when the same investigation technique was applied to conscious individuals. Scientists ensured beforehand that the six patients were indeed in REM sleep.
In the near future, the MPIP team plans to recruit a batch of even more lucid dreamers. This will enable them to have access to more successful observations sessions, since more than two individuals will probably fall asleep in the lab.
Regardless of whether that study will ever be conducted, experts who were not a part of this work say that the German team was able to capture sufficient amount of relevant data to keep sleep experts and neuroscientists busy for a long time, ScienceNow reports.