How Dreams play a vital role in our cognitive development, memory, and learned skills and some pro-tips for developmental dreaming

POLL: How many dreams do you remember each night?
None... just amnesiac sleep.
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In this thread, I will present how dreams are vital for our cognitive development and play a role in neuronal development, learning and memory consolidation during sleep. How we can gamify dreaming as one means to encourage dream development for a healthier dream life, and reap the benefits of how these processes benefit our ability to learn and remember.

Dreams emerge from a process known as hippocampal replay. When we start to rest and fall asleep, the hippocampus (the long term memory region of the brain) starts to send recorded memory/experiences back through the neocortex and to specific regions of the brain for memory consolidation.

Premediate replay happens as we enter rest, so the act of falling asleep. In 1994, Tetris was noted as causing the Tetris Effect or Tetris Syndrome.

The Tetris Effect or Tetris Syndrome occurs when a person plays Tetris for a long period of time, when they close their eyes to go to sleep, they still see the game and even continue to interact and play the game during premediate sleep. We know from research into hippocampal replay that this behavior increases during rest and is directly linked to how we learn and also consolidate long-term memories. The Tetris Effect is an early example of video game content influencing hippocampal replay during rest.

Jeffery Goldsmith's article from 1994 Wired Magazine article entitled, "This is your brain on Tetris" which coined the term 'The Tetris Effect'.
[link to www.wired.com (secure)]

Research into replay with BrainGate with a game took place in a study from May, 2020 that used two human volunteers who had electrodes installed into their brain to study replay and learning in humans. What they discovered is just like Rat hippocampal studies, humans also evolved the same mechanism for learning and long-term memory consolidation. Place-cells in the hippocampus have firing sequences that can be recorded and then observe during dreaming 'replaying' as part of NREM1 sleep.

https://imgur.com/toVSFkN

Source: [link to www.cell.com (secure)]

In Hippocampal replay studies on rats. Researchers used a similar method of installing electrodes to record place-cell firing sequences during a rat moving through a maze, then observed these same spike-pattern sequences repeating during sleep in ripples indicating the rat was dreaming of activities it preformed during the day.

https://imgur.com/hp0Rpkf

When they disrupted 'replay' they discovered this impaired the rat's learning performance.

https://imgur.com/iyuwxJV

Source: [link to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (secure)]

The role of dreaming has been studied in both humans and mammals. The reason why dreams occur stems from the need for long-term memory consolidation and learning through replay of waking events and the development of neural-pathways and synapses during REM. Before fMRI research, dream researchers observing the behavior of the hippocampus during sleep noted that it's behavior changed. Instead of taking information in during the day, the hippocampus started sending information back into the neocortex of the brain. This behavior lead some neuroscientists to conclude that this could explain some people cannot remember their dreams because the information from dreaming doesn't return back to the hippocampus and takes place in short-term memory.

If the hippocampus is the last to go to sleep, it could very well be the last to wake up, Andrillon said. "So, you could have this window where you wake up with a dream in your short-term memory, but since the hippocampus is not fully awake yet, your brain is not able to keep that memory," Andrillon told Live Science.
Source: [link to www.realclearscience.com (secure)]

The problem with amensiac dreaming has been an area of interest for many dream researchers as to why some people can remember dreams, and other people cannot. There is one study that used fMRI imagining with people who had high-frequency dream recall and people who did not. What they discovered was another important clue relating to dream recall and that was the development of 'white-matter' density in HF dreamers vs lower density in LF dreamers.

https://imgur.com/Twrr6wD

There is substantial evidence in sleep and dream research that shows REM sleep and REM dreams play a role in the development of neural pathways and synapses. REM sleep puts stimulation of neural pathways into over-drive and is observed in REM sleep and babies as part of their cognitive development.

Source: [link to pathways.org (secure)]

During REM sleep, the brain prunes neural connections and develops new ones.

"We further show that dendritic calcium spikes arising during REM sleep are important for pruning and strengthening new spines. Together, these findings indicate that REM sleep has multifaceted functions in brain development, learning and memory consolidation by selectively eliminating and maintaining newly formed synapses via dendritic calcium spike-dependent mechanisms."

Source: [link to www.nature.com (secure)]

When we study dream frequency by age, the production of dream content is very high during the developing brain and begins to drastically decrease with age. This decrease shows that for many people by the age of 60, there is a 99.98% loss in dream recall.

https://imgur.com/O1LRls7

Source: [link to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (secure)]

What studies like Tore Neilson presents is cognitive decline with dreaming as we age. Many people do not participate in the 3-5 dreams they have during sleep, so the lack of stimulation to regions like the medial prefrontal cortex stunts neural pathway development for dream recall and this region atrophies until people no longer dream at all. Cognitive atrophy and stunted dream development is only a concern though for people who want to participate in the nightly routine of dreaming.

Why this is important with regards to video games and their ability to shape and influence the content of our dreams, is many people who might want to explore this interesting phenomena of long-term memory consolidation and replay as a fun means to entertain oneself with dreaming when that replay is an interactive version of their favorite video game, is that many people do not realize that dreaming itself is a developmental skill and that the brain atrophies without stimulation from dreaming causing less neural pathway development in regions of the dreaming mind stunting dream recall, somatic sensory dream replay and even higher-cognitive functions such as self-awareness.

Dream researchers have been using video-games as a tool to help with dream development. It's self-evident for most that influences from our day 'replay' as dreams during sleep. You may have noticed dreams composed of influences from movies, TV shows, video games and activities during the day. The reason why some people have dreams that produce interactive-replays of games stems from the notion that the subconscious mind doesn't know what this information is, but pipes it through the same replay processes sorting out the information in a dream interactive replay.

Jayne Gackenback first wrote about video games and their influence on dreams in 2008.

Video Game Play Effects on Dreams: Self-Evaluation and Content Analysis
Jayne Isabel Gackenbach, Beena Kuruvilla
Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2008; 2; 2; 169-186

In analyzing the dreams of many high-frequency gamers many elements of the game incorporated into dream replay and the game itself showing up as themes in their dreams.

" This certainly seems to characterize the virtual world of many of today's games showing up in their dreams."

Source: [link to www.eludamos.org (secure)]

As such, more research has been used using video games for developing dreaming skills such as self-awareness or lucid dreaming.

Playing physically interactive video games is associated with lucid dreaming, study finds
by Eric W. Dolan July 13, 2019in Cognitive Science

Marc Sestir, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Central Arkansas, and Jennifer Peszka, an associate professor of psychology at Hendrix College, became interested in the connection between video game play and lucid dreaming thanks to Peszka’s student Ming Tai — a gamer herself and co-author of the new study.

Source: [link to www.psypost.org (secure)]

It turns out that lucid dreaming, or self-aware dreaming is linked to activity in the prefrontal cortex during sleep. That fMRI studies on people who claimed to lucid dream was observed when activity increased during 'lucid dreams' and this activity appeared in the prefrontal cortex vs non-lucid dreaming who during REM showed no activity.

https://imgur.com/42fuPmf

Neural Correlates of Dream Lucidity Obtained from Contrasting Lucid versus Non-Lucid REM Sleep: A Combined EEG/fMRI Case Study

Martin Dresler, PhD,*,1 Renate Wehrle, PhD,*,1 Victor I. Spoormaker, PhD,1 Stefan P. Koch, PhD,2 Florian Holsboer, MD, PhD,1 Axel Steiger, MD,1 Hellmuth Obrig, MD,2,3,4 Philipp G. Sämann, MD,1 and Michael Czisch, PhD1 (2012, Jul 1) Sleep

Source: [link to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (secure)]

There are lots of new insights into why we dream, the mechanics of dreaming and the importance of dreams with regards to our cognitive development, memory and learning. Many people enjoy dreaming but very few look at dreams as a developmental skill that can be fine-tuned to become more than just dreaming.

For example, using a video game for dream development can make the resulting dream themed in that game a lot of fun for a person who enjoys that game. Using movies, tv shows and other visual/audible sources can help set a fun theme or goal for an interactive dream replay.

As dreaming is a developmental skill that suffers from atrophy if one doesn't make an effort to participate, gamifying the dream development can not only help with improving the dream experience but can make this participation fun and entertaining.

Maybe dreaming wasn't so crazy after all? Some birds, all mammals and every human dreams. Why? It's part of our cognitive development, skill development and long-term memory consolidation. So strange that people give dreaming such a bad rap, when in truth, it's a very healthy part of sleep that can be tuned into an art-form and entertainment system. Gamifying dreaming is just one way in which we can make this night-time routine more interesting and fun to encourage dream participation and dream development.



Last Edited by YouAreDreaming on 12/06/2021 01:52 PM