The HReport: In The Journals
Mind: A new study sheds light on the role that dreams play in the important process of learning. The new findings suggest that dreams may be the sleeping brain’s way of telling us that it is hard at work on the process of memory consolidation, integrating our recent experiences to help us with performance-related tasks in the short run and, in the long run, translating this material into information that will have widespread application to our lives. “What’s got us really excited is that after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information,” explained Robert Stickgold, PhD, senior author of the study and Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The study is reported in the online issue of the journal Current Biology. Read More…
