Dreams Originate In The ‘hot Zone’ In The Brain

New research and new discoveries in sleep science are always fascinating. For many people, dreams are an important source of personal discovery. A research team of neuroscientists from the United States, Italy and Switzerland has discovered what they call the brain’s “hot zone,” a brain region that turns on when we dream.

The ‘hot zone’ is a part of the brain that appears to be active when we dream. Scientists also discovered that we don’t just dream during REM sleep. This can help us understand something about the content of our dreams. These curious discoveries can give us a better understanding of human consciousness.

The study

The research team examined brain activity in 32 subjects in their sleep lab. They studied them over the course of five to ten nights. They regularly woke the subjects up to ask them whether they had been dreaming or not.

The researchers asked the subjects if they remembered part of their dreams or if they couldn’t remember anything at all. They then compared the brain activity in the dreamless periods with that in the periods in which the subjects had dreamed.

The difference between this study and previous sleep studies is the number of electrodes used. This time, the researchers used 256 electrodes, which gave them a much more complete picture.

The results

The team found that in a certain part of the brain called the “hot zone”, electrical activity increased when the subjects dreamed. The ‘hot zone’ is located in the sulcus parietooccipitalis or wall-occipital fissure. Everything seems to indicate that these could be the neural connections of dreams.

When this area of ​​the brain is stimulated while awake, it can cause “a sense of a parallel world or a dream-like state.” This is a fascinating discovery.

What this finding also suggests is that consciousness resides in a posterior part of the brain. Until now, scientists thought it was in the frontal and parietal lobes.

“It seems that only a very limited, very limited activation of the brain is required to generate conscious experiences. Until now, we thought that large areas of the brain had to be active to generate conscious experiences,” said Francesca Siclari, co-author of the study.

Opinions on the ‘hot zone’

Some people believe that this may give us insight into the content of our dreams. However, not everyone is convinced of this. Professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stickgold, doesn’t believe this particular study will help us discover dreams.

According to Dr. Stickgold, the dreams we remember and the dreams we forget probably have a different electronic “signature.”

dr. However, Stickgold agrees with the belief that the most interesting thing about this research is the possibility of understanding one of the greatest mysteries of the human race: the nature and origin of consciousness.

The idea that different parts of the brain behave in different ways when we dream has been studied for more than a decade. It is the shared vision of many researchers. They suspected it to be true, but never had enough empirical evidence to confirm the theory.

Future Hot Zone Investigations

Scientists are considering performing this type of “hot zone” stimulation on patients who are in a coma or having seizures.

Almost everyone agrees that future research could potentially give us access to other states of consciousness. In addition, it is believed that it will help clarify which other brain regions are involved in these different states of consciousness.

Or maybe we discover where and how we connect with the Consciousness with a capital ‘B’, or the indelible absolute reality. It depends on who you are and how you want to interpret it. However you look at it, it’s an interesting topic that we understand a little bit better.