“…In adults, reaction times (which are used as the score) increase linearly with the degree of rotation, but children do not show this relationship and do not seem to be mentally imagining movement using visuo-spatial imagery. This is consistent with their dream reports lacking movement[21]. …”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitysupporting
confidence: 91%
“…For instance, children studies demonstrate that dream features show a gradual development that parallels their cognitive development when awake[21] (Box 2). Patients with brain lesions that impair their waking cognition show corresponding deficits in dreams.…”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Since children often show signs of emotion in sleep, many assume they dream a great deal. However, a series of studies by David Foulkes showed that children under the age of 7 reported dreaming only 20% of the time when awakened from REM sleep, compared with 80–90% in adults[21]. …”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitymentioning
Dreams are a most remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that our brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate by itself an entire world of conscious experiences. Content analysis and developmental studies have furthered our understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging, and neurophysiology have advanced our knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research in order to address some fundamental questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception.
Contemporary dream researchAlthough dreams have fascinated us since the dawn of time, their rigorous, scientific study is a recent development [1][2][3][4] (Supplementary Fig. 1). In The interpretation of dreams [5] Freud predicted that "Deeper research will one day trace the path further and discover an organic basis for the mental event." Recent work, which we review in this article, begins to fulfill Freud s prediction.The study of dreams is a formidable task, because dream consciousness is only accessible via report rather than direct observation (Box 1) and because it is difficult to manipulate dream content experimentally, whether by exposure to stimuli before [6,7] or during sleep [7,8]. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the contents of specific dreams [9], and most modern dream research tries to relate neuronal activity retrospectively to dream form rather than dream content, i.e. to focus on properties of all dreams rather than to investigate the neural correlates of a particular dream. Yet, as we shall see, encouraging progress has been made in relating the phenomenology of dreams to underlying brain activity, and to studies of brain damage and development.
BOX 1 Can reports be trusted to accurately convey internal experiences in sleep?Do dream reports obtained by awakening a sleeping subject accurately convey subjective experiences in sleep? At one extreme, we could be fully conscious throughout sleep but remember dreams well, little, or not at all depending on the brain state when we are awakened. Indeed, we know that dreaming often goes unreported -some people claim they *Corresponding author: Tononi, G. (gtononi@wisc.edu). Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
NIH Public Access
Author Manuscrip...
“…In adults, reaction times (which are used as the score) increase linearly with the degree of rotation, but children do not show this relationship and do not seem to be mentally imagining movement using visuo-spatial imagery. This is consistent with their dream reports lacking movement[21]. …”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitysupporting
confidence: 91%
“…For instance, children studies demonstrate that dream features show a gradual development that parallels their cognitive development when awake[21] (Box 2). Patients with brain lesions that impair their waking cognition show corresponding deficits in dreams.…”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Since children often show signs of emotion in sleep, many assume they dream a great deal. However, a series of studies by David Foulkes showed that children under the age of 7 reported dreaming only 20% of the time when awakened from REM sleep, compared with 80–90% in adults[21]. …”
Section: Phenomenology Of Dreams and Their Relation To Brain Activitymentioning
Dreams are a most remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that our brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate by itself an entire world of conscious experiences. Content analysis and developmental studies have furthered our understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging, and neurophysiology have advanced our knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research in order to address some fundamental questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception.
Contemporary dream researchAlthough dreams have fascinated us since the dawn of time, their rigorous, scientific study is a recent development [1][2][3][4] (Supplementary Fig. 1). In The interpretation of dreams [5] Freud predicted that "Deeper research will one day trace the path further and discover an organic basis for the mental event." Recent work, which we review in this article, begins to fulfill Freud s prediction.The study of dreams is a formidable task, because dream consciousness is only accessible via report rather than direct observation (Box 1) and because it is difficult to manipulate dream content experimentally, whether by exposure to stimuli before [6,7] or during sleep [7,8]. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the contents of specific dreams [9], and most modern dream research tries to relate neuronal activity retrospectively to dream form rather than dream content, i.e. to focus on properties of all dreams rather than to investigate the neural correlates of a particular dream. Yet, as we shall see, encouraging progress has been made in relating the phenomenology of dreams to underlying brain activity, and to studies of brain damage and development.
BOX 1 Can reports be trusted to accurately convey internal experiences in sleep?Do dream reports obtained by awakening a sleeping subject accurately convey subjective experiences in sleep? At one extreme, we could be fully conscious throughout sleep but remember dreams well, little, or not at all depending on the brain state when we are awakened. Indeed, we know that dreaming often goes unreported -some people claim they *Corresponding author: Tononi, G. (gtononi@wisc.edu). Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
NIH Public Access
Author Manuscrip...
“…From all my data, the suggestion is that dreaming best reflects the development of a specific cognitive competence, indexed by certain kinds of tests of visual‐spatial imagination, leading to the conclusion that such imagination must be a critical skill in dream‐making (Foulkes, 1999, p. 90).…”
“…Studies by dream psychologist David Foulkes, described in Foulkes, 1999, suggest that, contrary to widespread scientific and folk assumptions, dreaming is a sophisticated cognitive activity that emerges relatively late in human development. Foulkes’s study of children suggests to him that children under the age of five dream much less frequently, and much less actively, than do adults.…”
What is it like to dream? On an orthodox view, dreams involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that orthodoxy about dreaming should be rejected in favor of an imagination model of dreaming . I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has argued that we do not have misleading sensory experiences while dreaming, and partially in agreement with Ernest Sosa, who has argued that we do not form false beliefs while dreaming. Rather, on my view, dreams involve mental imagery and propositional imagination. I defend the imagination model of dreaming from objections.
The presence of dreams in human sleep, especially in REM sleep, and the detection of physiologically similar states in mammals has led many to ponder whether animals experience similar sleep mentation. Recent advances in our understanding of the anatomical and physiological correlates of sleep stages, and thus dreaming, allow a better understanding of the possibility of dream mentation in nonhuman mammals. Here, we explore the potential for dream mentation, in both non-REM and REM sleep across mammals. If we take a hard-stance, that dream mentation only occurs during REM sleep, we conclude that it is unlikely that monotremes, cetaceans, and otariid seals while at sea, have the potential to experience dream mentation. Atypical REM sleep in other species, such as African elephants and Arabian oryx, may alter their potential to experience REM dream mentation. Alternatively, evidence that dream mentation occurs during both non-REM and REM sleep, indicates that all mammals have the potential to experience dream mentation. This non-REM dream mentation may be different in the species where non-REM is atypical, such as during unihemispheric sleep in aquatic mammals (cetaceans, sirens, and Otariid seals). In both scenarios, the cetaceans are the least likely mammalian group to experience vivid dream mentation due to the morphophysiological independence of their cerebral hemispheres. The application of techniques revealing dream mentation in humans to other mammals, specifically those that exhibit unusual sleep states, may lead to advances in our understanding of the neural underpinnings of dreams and conscious experiences.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
