Lucid dreaming as a way to study consciousness
Forming / / December 19, 2019
The average person spends about six years of his life in dreamsIn the so-called rapid eye movement phase. That is about 2190 days, or 52 560 hours, we spend watching dreams. Despite the fact that we can experience emotions and feelings during sleep, our consciousness is in a state different from when we are awake. That is why it is difficult to distinguish dream from reality, and we often take what has come to us in a dream, with the actual state of affairs.
But there are people who may be experiencing lucid dreaming, during which part of the mind remains awake. Thanks to this lucid dreaming can be controlled - something like what he saw us in the movie "Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Lucid dreaming is known to science for a long time, but still not well understood. However, recent studies have shown the benefit of the fact that this state is a border that we are awake and asleep at the same time.
Lucid dreaming - one of the many "anomalous" phenomena that can occur during sleep.
An example of another such thing - sleep paralysis, because of which you wake up in terror and can not move any part of the body. Most often it occurs immediately after we fall asleep, or just before awakening. Sleep paralysis experienced more than 30% of people, while 8% admit that it happens quite often with them.
Although sleep paralysis is a common symptom of narcolepsy, post-traumatic disorders and panic attacks, his experience, and those who do not suffer from any of the above problems.
There are also false awakening - when you wake up only to realize that he was still asleep. The fact that such awakening occurred at least once in the last month, said 41% respondents.
Along with lucid dreaming, all such states are training our ability to stay awake while we sleep. Scientists are considering the hypothesis that lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, false awakenings, and many others such events occur at a time when our mind is in a "hybrid" state - between dream and reality.
Lucid Dreaming and the Brain
Studies say more half of of us at least once in their lives experienced lucid dreaming. And this is good news, because this experience allows a person to create the desired scenario in sleep time. There is evidence that lucid dreaming can be call and stimulate. People come together in an online community to discuss the techniques in the dream of achieving greater clarity. They teach the mind to share the dream and the reality, a dream to manage and utilize what is happening in dream for personal growth.
During recently research participants were asked to give details of his last dream.
Scientists have found that during the lucid dreams (compared to normal) people are becoming much more insightful, control the thoughts and actions that are actively using logic and well remembered everything that happened to them reality.
Other studies have investigated the ability of people to make informed decisions in real life, and during sleep. It turned out that volitional capacity of a high degree of transmitted from reality to dream. However, the ability to plan worsens when a person goes into a lucid dream.
You can clearly feel the difference between conscious and ordinary dreams. Scientists suggest that this means that these processes involve different mechanisms of brain activity. But to confirm this hypothesis is much more complicated than it might seem. If scientists have conducted an experiment for this, they would have to scan the brains of participants in overnight, and then decrypt the received data, to distinguish from a lucid dream usual.
Brilliant work on the study of this issue led to the creation of a code of communication between people in a state of lucid dreaming and researchers. Before starting the experiment, participants and researchers agreed on the conditional sign - for example, two eye movements to the right. When people are immersed in REM sleep, they can apply the signal once passed into a state of lucid dreaming.
Through this study, scientists were able to learn that lucid dreaming is different from conventional enhanced activity of the frontal lobes of the brain. It is noteworthy that this area is associated with the ability to "higher-order": logical thinking, willpower. Usually, we can observe their appearance only when a person is awake. type of brain activity during lucid dreaming - gamma wave, which means that we will use various aspects of our experience (memories, thoughts, and emotions) and use them separately and symbiosis.
Further studies have shown that stimulation of the frontal areas of the brain during lucid dreaming leads to improved data human abilities.
Other studies more accurately identified regions of the brain involved in lucid dreaming. This frontal lobe and precuneus. Thus, the assumption of a hybrid state of consciousness just confirmed.
The problem of consciousness and its solution
One of the most difficult issues for modern neuroscience is: how consciousness arises in the brain? One hypothesis suggests using just lucid dreaming as a key to understanding consciousness and the accompanying processes.
Lucid and ordinary dreams represent two different states of consciousness, all of which we get a unique experience. At the same brain state remains almost identical in both situations. Comparing the small differences in brain activity during lucid dreaming and ordinary, we can find those features that affect our level of consciousness during sleep.
In addition, due to the fact that the participants in the experiment were able to give signals to the eyes, we can learn more about the neurobiological activity of the brain at a particular moment of lucid dreaming. This will help scientists to investigate the fundamental processes taking place in human consciousness.
Moreover, now there is hope that researchers will be able to understand how consciousness arises at all in our brain.