One side of your brain might be giving you nightmares
Nick Carne
Nick Carne
Quote:Researchers believe they have identified a pattern of brain activity that predicts anger experienced during dreaming.
It they are right, this might help explain the neural basis of the emotional content of nightmares, which are associated with mental and sleep disorders such as anxiety, depression and insomnia.
While humans experience emotions both while awake and while dreaming, there has been only limited research into the brain mechanisms underlying the affective component of dreams.
In the recent study, Pilleriin Sikka and colleagues at University of Turku, Finland, University of Skövde, Sweden, and University of Cambridge, UK, discovered a shared emotional mechanism between the two states of consciousness.
The researchers obtained electroencephalography recordings from 17 healthy individuals during two separate nights in a sleep laboratory.
After participants reached rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the point where dreams are most vivid – they were woken and asked to describe their dreams and rate the emotions they experienced....
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell