As the saying goes, "I think about it day and night, and I dream at night." The root of dreams is actually the activity of the brain. We know that the human brain can constantly respond to external stimuli when it is awake. In the evening, when people are tired, they go to bed. During most of sleep, brain waves and eye movements are the same as when waking up, and only the body muscles are in a state of inhibition. At this time, what we experienced, saw or thought during the day will reappear in our dreams.
The content of dreaming is often related to the stimulation during the day or during sleep. If you think too much about something during the day, you will dream about it at night, or even if you have never thought about someone or something, because you have experienced it before, some nerve cells in your brain will "recall" the past when you sleep at night, so you will dream about it.
When sleeping, external stimuli will make the brain react incorrectly, resulting in all kinds of weird dreams. In addition, the stimulation and pathological changes of various organs in the body will also cause similar scenes in dreams. For example, if you are in a hurry, you will dream that you can't find the toilet anywhere.
Dreaming is a physiological phenomenon. Normal dreaming will not affect your health, but if you often have nightmares or strange dreams that affect your sleep, you should see a doctor and treat them in time. After people fall asleep, a small number of brain cells are still active, which is the basis of dreaming. Why do people dream and what happens if they don't dream?
Normal dream activity is one of the important factors to ensure the normal vitality of the body.
Pavlov said: "dreaming is a trace of excitement, mostly the excitement of old traces." Scientists have done some experiments to stop people from dreaming. That is to say, when the sleeper has a dream brainwave, he is immediately awakened to stop his dream from continuing, and so on. The results show that deprivation of dreams will lead to a series of physiological abnormalities of human body, such as blood pressure, pulse, body temperature and skin electrical response ability, and the function of autonomic nervous system will be weakened. At the same time, it will also cause a series of adverse psychological reactions, such as anxiety, tension, irritability, perceptual hallucinations, memory disorders, irritability and so on. When a person's eyes turn, it means that the sleeper is dreaming. Nowadays, when people study the physiology of dreams, the number and length of dreams are measured by the number and time of eye movements. But some people say that people's sleep is always in a rhythmic cycle, that is, in the alternation of rapid eye movement sleep and slow wave sleep. Slow-wave sleep is a quiet sleep state, while rapid eye movement sleep causes people's eyes to rotate rapidly because of irregular breathing and heart rhythm. Obviously, normal dream activity is one of the important factors to ensure the normal vitality of the body.
Dreams are a way to coordinate the balance of human psychological world.
Because the right hemisphere is dominant when dreaming and the left hemisphere is dominant after awakening, the dynamic balance between nerve regulation and mental activity can be achieved by alternately waking up and dreaming during the 24-hour day and night activities of the body. Therefore, dreams are a way to balance people's psychological world, especially for people's attention, emotions and cognitive activities. Dreamless sleep is not only of poor quality, but also a sign of brain injury or disease.
Dream exploration
Recent research results also confirm this view, that is, dreams are the result of the brain's regulatory center balancing various functions of the body, and dreams are the need for the healthy development of the brain and maintaining normal thinking. If the brain's regulatory center is damaged, dreams will not form, or only some incomplete dream fragments will appear. If you sleep for a long time without dreams, it is worth people's vigilance. Of course, if you have nightmares for a long time, it is often a sign of weakness or some diseases.
More rigorous scientific research on dreaming began in17th century. 1886 Robert, an expert on dreams, believes that people are exposed to countless information intentionally or unintentionally in their daily activities, and they must release some of these information through dreams. This is the famous theory that "dreaming is to forget", which began to be popular again in the1980s one hundred years later. Shortly after Robert, Freud's theory of psychological dream interpretation appeared again. Freud believed that people constantly have desires and desires, which are expressed and released through various disguises and deformations in dreams, so that they will not break into people's consciousness and wake people up. That is to say, dreams can help people eliminate those desires and desires that are unacceptable to the conscious system and are the guardians of sleep protection.
Freud's theory was popular from the beginning of this century to the 1960s. Later, the study of dreams in the world slowly left the field of psychology and entered the biological laboratory. Since then, dreaming has been regarded as a biological phenomenon. Michel Jouvet, a neurobiologist at the Dream Research Laboratory in Lyon, France, is an internationally renowned expert in dream research. Jouvet defined dreaming as "parasomnia" in 1959. He found through EEG test that people have 5 ~ 20 minutes of dreamy sleep every 90 minutes, and the signals reflected on the instrument screen are different, showing the changes of brain activity during sleep. If the subject is awakened when the EEG shows dreamless sleep, he will say that there is no dream; If you wake him up when he shows dreamy sleep, he will remember the dream he just had. In addition, the researchers used X-ray tomography technology to test and found that the image of the brain in dreamy sleep stage is close to that in waking state.
Interestingly, the researchers found that dreaming is not unique to human beings, and birds and all mammals also dream. In the late 1970s, a scientist discovered through experiments on mice that dreamy sleep was also related to memory. Dreamy mice can remember their experiences better than those deprived of dream sleep, but the results of this study are not applicable to humans, because doctors use an inhibitor called monoamine oxidase when treating patients with mental depression, which can completely cancel people's dream sleep, but will not cause memory impairment.
Wei Ru, a French expert on dreams, believes that dreams are determined by genetic factors. He compared the letters and numbers emitted by mice during their dream sleep and found that mice with the same genetic system had similar letters and numbers. A recent experiment by Bulga, a researcher at the University of Colorado in the United States, confirmed this theory. Bulga studied identical twins and found that twins who were raised by two different families in different places after birth actually had similar dream experiences, which proved that human dream performance is genetic memory.
In addition, there is a recent report on dreaming research in the just published American Science Weekly. The author of this report, a cooperative team of the Washington Institute of Neuroscience and the National Institute of Health in Bocaistar, Maryland, tested more than a dozen people who accepted the experiment with a high-performance neural tomography camera and found that the blood circulation in this specific area of their cerebral cortex was abnormally accelerated during the dream sleep stage. The researchers found that the visual nervous system responsible for seeing dream scenes and external visual scenes in the brain originally existed independently. According to the report, after seeing that the internal visual system of dreams has been proved to exist independently, it can explain why we have inflated emotions in dreams and why we can accept unreasonable eccentric plots and chaotic concepts of time and space.