what can neuroscience tell us about dreaming?

[ZeN]

but isn't the life one lives also 'mostly derived from the persons real life experiences and their thoughts'

dreams are clearly manifestations of recurring worries and anxieties. they are often manifestations of elusive goals and ambitions. they are perpetual cliffhangers. they are produced by raw feeling since your consciousness is dormant and your subconscious is running the show. they can be controlled, and one can be trained to control them, but with certain highly specific constraints that are unadjustable. they can be your kingdom or they can be your prison. they reflect your deepest secret passions, your worst kept fears. they happen about 100,000 times to each person in a lifetime. they generate chemical stimulants in the brain that compel us to get up in the morning and keep on keeping on. they are entirely idiosyncratic.



i honestly don't know what to make of them

All wrong.

[RidonKs]

All wrong.

oh boy do tell, you've got a phd in make believe so i'll pay close attention

[Bosnian Sajo]

Calling on Jefferson "cash" money to the thread please, Jefferson "cash" money.

[NBAplayoffs2001]

Besides being an insanely interesting undergrad major, career options afterwards are limited to research pretty much (although some of them are very fascinating, I know someone who landed a high end research lab job post college). As is most hard sciences.

It wasn't a major offered at my school. Surprisingly, biochem isn't a major too. You can be a bio major however and have a concentration in chemical bio or something. It's weird. If neuroscience was a major at my undergrad, I probably would have considered it when I changed majors freshman year.

[shlver]

It’s difficult to precisely say what the source of dreaming is but we can observe physiological sources of activity during periods of sleep associated with dreaming(REM sleep) through observation of different aspects of neurological activity such as blood flow(functional MRI), metabolic activity(gene expression), electrical activity(EEG), etc.

This particular study enlisted the help of experienced lucid dreamers to flex their respective hands once they became lucid. The researchers found that the motor neurons associated with hand clenching were activated during the lucid dream as well as clenching while awake(control).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...60982211010311

This study found glial cell formation and subsequent myelination were upregulated during sleep giving further support to the idea neuronal pathways formed through learning are reinforced during sleep.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3874087/

There’s plenty more out there, but like consciousness; we only know what parts of brain activity correlates to the act of dreaming, not the source.

[ZeN]

oh boy do tell, you've got a phd in make believe so i'll pay close attention

We already know you don't pay attention to shit, so stop being a damn hypocrite.