Sleep and Our Health

Here is an interesting summary article about the importance of sleep and our health. The author discusses how sleep affects memory, the endocrine system, the immune system, and psychiatric disorders. The author uses quotes from a Harvard sleep researcher, Dr. Stickgold, who explains some of the recent findings about sleep and health.

I thought his description of dream importance was a little confusing. In the beginning, he suggests dreams are "much, much less important" than once thought. Then he describes how dreams help us remember and organize recent events. Perhaps he means dreams are less important with regard to analysis of the unconscious?

MRI scanners may be able to detect visual images in dreams

During sleep studies, I can tell when someone is in dream sleep. However, I can't determine what they dreaming about. Here is an article about research done in Japan showing that an MRI may be able to predict what you are dreaming about. They studied three men in early stages of sleep with an MRI. This showed the researchers what area of the brain was activated during dreaming. The researchers woke the subjects up and had them describe what they were dreaming about. They correlated the visual dream description with the location that lit up on the MRI. Then, when the men dreamed again in the MRI, researchers were able to predict about 70% of the time, what the person was dreaming about by noting the location of the brain that had lit up on the MRI. Pretty cool, huh?