dreaming and the motor sensory
What I found most important about this article is the fact that the brain lights up while asleep similar to how it lights up for corresponding awake actions. This gives credence to the idea that one is able to learn or practice skills in their sleep and the brains neural pathways have the ability to reinforce connections.
Reference:
Martin Dresler, Stefan P. Koch, Renate Wehrle, Victor I. Spoormaker, Florian Holsboer, Axel Steiger, Philipp G. Sämann, Hellmuth Obrig, Michael Czisch, Dreamed Movement Elicits Activation in the Sensorimotor Cortex, Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 21, 8 November 2011, Pages 1833-1837, ISSN 0960-9822, 10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.029. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211010311)
Edit (12/11/2012):
What I found most important about this article is the fact that the brain lights up while asleep similar to how it lights up for corresponding awake actions. This gives credence to the idea that one is able to learn or practice skills in their sleep and the brains neural pathways have the ability to reinforce connections.
Once again, an elegant description how dreams and actions are connected. This also hits on one the themes that Dr. Weissburg had in his interview with us, which is that sleep is not a unitary state (non-REM, REM and lucid sleep are all different things). Also, even though we feel like there is just the separation between our sleeping life and our waking life, REM sleep and dreaming are actually much closer to our awake activities than they are to the rest of our sleep. The fact that our brain is active while our body is not during sleep seems to be evidence for its importance evolutionary. Why else would we have evolved to be defenseless for a third of our life while our brain rehearses the input for physical actions?
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