What happens to your brain when you’re dreaming
Big Think
0:01 In the modern age,
0:02 we've lost our reverence for the dream state.
0:04 But more and more evidence is accumulating,
0:07 which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical
0:10 to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities
0:14 that human beings evidence, and our special creativity.
0:32 There are some people who believe that dreams
0:34 really are just kind of a throwaway thing.
0:36 There are other people that think
0:37 that dreams actually do serve a purpose.
0:40 Human REM sleep has a lot of very peculiar characteristics.
0:44 Every 90 minutes we go into REM sleep,
0:46 and our bodies become paralyzed,
0:49 yet our brains are more activated
0:51 than they are during waking consciousness,
0:54 and we're forced to watch these things we call dreams.
0:57 So why would Mother Nature do something like that?
1:05 The older models, when you look at Freud,
1:07 and you look at more Jungian thought,
1:09 and there's still people who really use
1:10 the Jungian thought of dream analysis
1:13 is really that you analyze the dreams.
1:15 The dreams are there for a purpose.
1:17 For some people, they say it's about wish fulfillment.
1:19 It's about the things that you're never able to do
1:21 in your day, you're actually fulfilling at night.
1:23 There are other people who will say
1:25 that it's actually telling you something.
1:27 If there's a lot of fear that's going on,
1:29 if there's a lot of anxiety,
1:30 it's manifesting itself in your nocturnal world.
1:33 So that analyzing it can help to open up thoughts
1:37 about what you need to do during the day.
1:38 So a lot of people who subscribe to the psychoanalysis,
1:42 the Jungian thought, will really focus a lot on dreams,
1:44 the meaning, and how it can be used to help you during the day.
1:48 Now, if you go to more modern thought,
1:50 there are some people who believe that dreams really
1:52 are just kind of a throwaway thing.
1:54 They're just a way of your brain processing
1:56 what's happened during the day,
1:58 but there's really no meaning to them.
1:59 A lot of imagery are just flashes of what happened.
2:02 There are other people that think
2:03 that dreams actually do serve a purpose,
2:06 but what that purpose is, we're not really sure.
2:09 So some people will believe
2:10 that it actually does have some psychological representation
2:12 of what's going on in the day,
2:13 but there's no need to sit and really analyze it.
2:17 Other people, like myself,
2:18 think the dreams are almost a reenactment
2:20 of what happened during the day,
2:21 but it's a way of you figuring out
2:23 and your brain processing
2:24 to figure out what does it need to hold onto and remember,
2:27 and what can it just throw away.
2:28 So it's like your brain has a large filing cabinet,
2:30 and it's opening up each drawer,
2:32 and it's taking in various images and memories from the day,
2:35 consolidating what it needs to,
2:36 and puts it in whatever file.
2:38 And then if there's something that doesn't fit
2:40 in any of the files and doesn't really belong,
2:41 you'll forget about it.
2:43 So it's a way of really getting a succinct way
2:45 of storing things in your brain.
2:52 We see glimpses of these other possible worlds
2:54 in our dreams.
2:55 What REM sleep normally does is it creates
2:58 all kinds of bizarre ideas,
2:59 but all kinds of creative ideas as well.
3:02 When our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic
3:05 acquired greater access to the REM sleep state,
3:09 both during sleep and during waking consciousness,
3:12 it helped to fuel the onset
3:15 of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes.
3:20 We know that REM sleep is especially important
3:23 for human beings because it creates these dissociative experiences
3:28 and associative experiences.
3:31 The dissociative experiences are something
3:33 that lots of us experience.
3:35 It's this dreamy states,
3:37 where you feel like you're not quite yourself
3:40 and you're in a, like a deja vu experience,
3:42 or a fluid mental state, a flow state,
3:46 but you're not sure what's real, what's unreal,
3:49 because you're immersed in all this imagery.
3:51 But as you go through those kinds of dissociative states,
3:56 it starts to relax or resolve into an associative state
4:01 so that things that were previously unrelated get combined.
4:06 And when unrelated ideas combine,
4:09 creative innovative things happen,
4:11 and REM sleep promotes that associative state, big time.
4:17 Our culture has lost its reverence for the dream state,
4:22 whereas traditional cultures absolutely reverenced dreams.
4:27 And I think some due reverences would help the culture
4:30 because it would create more openness to creativity
4:33 and disparate ideas.
4:35 This can help us solve the unknown unknowns
4:38 and help us get creative solutions
4:40 to the problems people are facing.