When you fall asleep, you enter a deep sleep cycle called REM sleep. REM means Rapid Eye Movement. When you enter this cycle, you get the deepest sleep, but it’s also when you begin to dream those vivid dreams you probably don’t remember when you wake up. Sure, if you’re untrained, you will only remember bits and pieces of them, but not enough to differentiate one dream from another during REM sleep. What if you could turn your dreams off altogether?
At the University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have done just that on mice. What the researchers inserted a optogenetic switch — Optogenetics being a biological technique which involves the use of light to control cells in living tissue, typically neurons, that have been genetically modified to …show more content…
When the scientists activated the neurons, the mice entered REM sleep. Remember, REM sleep is the sleep one has dreams. When you enter REM sleep, your body enters a state paralysis, so that if you are running a marathon in a dream, you don’t start reenacting this in your bed.
What they did later is deactivated the mouse’s neurons. This wouldn’t allow the ability for the mouse to enter REM sleep, hence preventing the mouse of dreaming.
science-can-tell-what-you-are-dreaming
“People used to think that this region of the medulla was only involved in the paralysis of skeletal muscles during REM sleep,” explained lead author Yang Dan, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “What we showed is that these neurons triggered all aspects of REM sleep, including muscle paralysis and the typical cortical activation that makes the brain look more awake than in non-REM sleep.”
What this could mean is that one day we could cut off REM sleep and prevent dreaming altogether. The problem with that is we need REM sleep to really get the rest that the human body craves after listening to a boss scream in our ear for 9 hours a
At the University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists have done just that on mice. What the researchers inserted a optogenetic switch — Optogenetics being a biological technique which involves the use of light to control cells in living tissue, typically neurons, that have been genetically modified to …show more content…
When the scientists activated the neurons, the mice entered REM sleep. Remember, REM sleep is the sleep one has dreams. When you enter REM sleep, your body enters a state paralysis, so that if you are running a marathon in a dream, you don’t start reenacting this in your bed.
What they did later is deactivated the mouse’s neurons. This wouldn’t allow the ability for the mouse to enter REM sleep, hence preventing the mouse of dreaming.
science-can-tell-what-you-are-dreaming
“People used to think that this region of the medulla was only involved in the paralysis of skeletal muscles during REM sleep,” explained lead author Yang Dan, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “What we showed is that these neurons triggered all aspects of REM sleep, including muscle paralysis and the typical cortical activation that makes the brain look more awake than in non-REM sleep.”
What this could mean is that one day we could cut off REM sleep and prevent dreaming altogether. The problem with that is we need REM sleep to really get the rest that the human body craves after listening to a boss scream in our ear for 9 hours a