UCLA–Tel Aviv study suggests REM sleep helps the brain capture snapshots of dream images

When we sleep, we experience our most vivid dreams and vigorous brain activity during the rapid eye movement, or REM phase. Although scientists have long suspected that our eyes flicker in response to what our unconscious mind sees in our dreams, no one has been able to prove it.  Now, an international team of researchers led by UCLA’s Dr. Itzhak Fried is the first to demonstrate that during dreams, our eyes and brains respond similarly to how they react to images when we’re awake. Published in the Aug. 11 online edition of Nature Communications, the findings offer a rare glimpse into the working of individual brain cells in the sleeping mind.  Fried, the study’s senior author, implanted electrodes deep into the brains of 19 people with drug-resistant epilepsy at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in order to identify the origin of their seizures prior to surgery.  For up to two weeks, the electrodes recorded the electrical activities of individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe, the bridge between visual perception and memories, allowing Fried to eavesdrop on the patients’ dreams. “Our earlier studies showed that these neurons fire when we view pictures of familiar people and places — or simply close our eyes to imagine or remember them,” said Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. But when the researchers reviewed the data from the electrode recordings, they saw something unexpected in the responses of ...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news