In 1926, for example, Denisova & Figurin (9), recording heart and respiratory rate of sleeping children, found that both changed cyclically, what is presently known to occur as vegetative components of dreaming activity. The atonia of myoclonia of active (REM) sleep. 120. Krueger JM, Obl F. A neuronal group theory of sleep function. during desynchronized sleep prevents sustained brain inactivity, which might occur during sleep. Lovblad KO, Thomas R, Jakod PM, Scammel T, Bassetti C, Griswold M, et al. Interestingly, bilateral ablation of the frontal lobes in cats leads to deep changes of the PGO potentials in the VI cranial nerves and in the mobilization of the lateral rectus muscles during desynchronized sleep (71). For example, the Muslim physician Ib Sinna, known in Spain as Avicena, considered dreams more or less according to Aristotle's opinion but could not resist to accepting their premonitory character. Braz J Med Biol Res 1995;28:385-96. J Abnorm Psychol 1982;91:433-6. The Psychology of Dreaming. In rats we found similar potentials in the amygdala as related to olfactory dreams, expressed as rostrum movements (32). 82. Ergebn. Noda H, Adey WR. An important contemporary of these authors, Charles Darwin, in his landmarking book Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 and reedited several times in the twentieth century (6), states that "at least birds and mammals do dream", a concept that still remains unchallenged, despite which most researchers that carry out studies on sleep still hold that dreaming is specifically human. Brain Res 1967;5:221-35. It is well known that the noise of an airplane usually does not awake people who live in the neighborhoods of airports but a light door creek may be enough to arouse them, as well as the groan produced by an infant child may arouse the parents, mainly the mother. Mirmiran M. The function of fetal neonatal rapid eye movement sleep. Brain Mechanism and Perceptual Awareness. "Insects are also creatures that do sleep, so much so that they can be seen resting with no movements whatsoever. Acta Med Iug 1978;32:45-50. Therefore, it seems that there are two major descending pathways from the rostral pons to the medulla that mediate muscle atonia during desynchronized sleep, one involved in the tonic and the other in the phasic muscle inhibition. Baldissera F, Cesa-Bianchi MG, Mancia M. Spinal reflexes in normal and unrestrained cats during sleep and wakefulness. Elsevier Publishing Company Amsterdam, 1962. WebHe says the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, the dream aids towards a solving or resolution of the problems. 60. 4 According to Freud, Depression of electrically induced reflexes (H- reflexes) in man during low voltage EEG sleep. The substrate, physiological mechanism, and function of dreaming have been explained by many scientists from the neurological, psychiatric, psychological, and philosophical perspective. 49. 121. J Neurophysiol 1946;9:165-71. 3. Accessibility Oka T, Iwakiri H, Mori S. Pontine-induced generalized suppression of postural muscle tone in a reflexively standing acute decerebrate cat. Brain Res 2002, submitted. Rados R, Cartwright RD. Berlucchi G. Mechanismen von Schlafen und Wachen. Sleep 1973;2:36-42. 38. Marini G. Motor phenomena during sleep. Therefore, desynchronized sleep should be ascribed a homeothermic function (116). Therefore, theta waves undergo both AM and FM changes that certainly carry some kind of information that may prove in the future to be crucial for understanding dreams. Neurosci Res 1993;17:127-140. Physiol., Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New york 1972:1-165. Experimental study. & Ajmone-Marsan, C. 112. In rats only the frontal cortex presents desynchronization whereas in all the remaining cortex, and in many subcortical sites, the electro-oscillograms oscillate as theta waves. No wonder that most dreams in humans have a visual component, explaining the reason why eye movements occur in any kind of dream, alone or as part of non-visual dreams. Such high values of r may mean that theta waves arrive in such areas almost synchronously, coming from some other sites in the central nervous system. 118. They may be involved only in intermediate steps of the processes that cause such movements. Brain Res 1985;327:362-6. In cats, Guazzi, Baccelli & Zanchetti (1966) demonstrated that due to such a cardiovascular hypoactivity the sensory afferents from glomus carotideus and glomus aorticus, that carry information from chemoreceptors sensitive to a decrease in oxygen blood concentration, attain an overwhelming relevance, inasmuch as following the transection of such afferents blood pressure goes continuously down during desynchronized sleep, leading to death (63). Gassel MM, Marchiafava PL, Pompeiano O. The neurophysiological mechanisms of the postural and motor events during desynchronized sleep. Cravo SLD, Lopes OU, Fraga CAB, Timo-Iaria C. Cardiovascular adjustments to noxious stimulation in decerebrate cats. 90. In 1944 Obhlmeyer, Brilmayer & Uhlstrung (10) observed that in humans penile erection occurs during sleep at intervals of 85 minutes, which is the average duration of a sleep cycle. Electroencephal Clin Neurophysiol 1990;76:388-99. Gottesmann C. Theta rhythm: the brain stem involvement. Proc Natl Acad Sci 1989;86:8737-41. Braz J Med Biol Res 1990;23:617-20. Generation of sleep is reasonably well known but not that of dreaming. In humans, equivalent potentials can be recorded from the occipital cortex. Stimulus response theory of dream: The stimulus response theory which existed prior to Freud is based upon the associationistic stimulus response view. This theory stresses the relationship between brain changes during sleep and changes in perceptual efficiency. Some disturbing stimuli force activity into one portion of the cerebral cortex. Dreaming 1996;6:121-30. The PGO potentials are correlates of dreams. Selective deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been found in desynchronized sleep. Different effects of several brain areas may affect dreaming in different ways. We propose that the function of dream sleep (more properly rapid-eye movement or REM sleep) is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in Such electrophysiological studies demonstrate that the abovementioned sites in the central nervous system are involved in the oniric movements but they do not prove that such structures generate them. C R Soc Biol (Paris) 1969;163:181-6. ), Ermdung, Schlaf un Traum, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Sttutgart 1971:123-172. Green JD, Arduini A. Hippocampal activity in arousal. 44. Carcione A, Santonastaso M, Sferruzza F, Riccardi I. Res Psychother. 106. While humans dream around 100 minutes every night, cats exhibit signs of dreaming during nearly 200 minutes per day. A dream is a conscious experience that occurs during sleep. 2020 Nov 12;11:565694. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2020.565694. Longitudinal studies. As pointed Muscle atonia during desynchronized sleep is, as stated above, generated in the alpha-coeruleus nucleus and involves both direct and indirect pathways that inhibit the motoneurons. 77. However, we all know that many dreams are not emotional at all. Jouvet (12,119), one of the most important researchers on sleep, suggests that dreaming is "a guardian and programmer of the hereditary part of our personality" and as such it plays a role in our general behavior. Even in humans, such electrophysiological, motor and vegetative signs of oniric activity are enough to know that a dream is going on. As will be shown below, in rats, that are macrosmatic animals, rostrum (snout) movements predominate during desynchronized sleep over eye movements (31,32). In rats we have recorded ear movements in paradoxical sleep, which we attribute to the occurrence of auditory dreams (see Figure 9). During the past two decades several authors also did quantify the kinds of dreams. Many hypotheses have been advanced but so far they do not explain why and what for we do dream. On the other hand, cells that were silent during the behavioral task did not show the increase in frequency. 104. Esquirol, one of the French psychiatrists who started the revolution that changed the ancient (an cruel) view of the mental diseases, spent several hours at night observing how his patients behaved during sleep and concluded that their movements while asleep were related to their dreams, just as Aristotle had found long ago. Madsen PC, Holm S, Vorstup S, Friberg L, Lassen NA, Wildschiotz LF. Brainstem Control of Wakefulness and Sleep. Careers. It decreases, apparently exponentially as a function of age, from 60% at 4 to 30% at 7-8 and to 10% at 18 years of age (112). Sleeping and Waking. Physiol Rev 1967;47:117-77. Nofzinger EA, Mintun MA, Wiseman MB, Kupfer DJ, Moore Ry. Schmidt MH, Sakai K, Valatrix JL, Jouvet M. The effects of spinal mesencephalic transections on sleep-related erections and ex-copula penile reflexes in the rat. In 1936, Klaue (12) described periods of sleep in cats characterized by high frequency electrocorticograms that he considered as a sign of deep sleep and in 1950 Passouant described a phase of desynchronization (a term coined by Adrian to label an increase in frequency with a decrease in voltage) of the EEG potentials in humans. Hodes R, Dement WC. Physiol Behav 1974;12:293-5. The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. ), Brainstem Mechanisms of Behavior. Calkins thus discovered that most dreams occur during the second half of the night and that around 89% of them are closely related to the events occurring the day before, confirming Aristotle. New findings on the neurological organization of dreaming: implications for psychoanalysis. Also, correlation is high when theta waves in the thalamic reticular nucleus are matched to those occurring in the nucleus reticularis pontis oralis. In: Baust, W. Researchers working on dream usually do not believe that dreaming may occur in non-human animals, probably due to religious and philosophical reasons but also to a great mistake, i.e., that dreaming is a high level mental activity, such as doing mathematics, but it is not. 16. In humans, Hansotia and colleagues (34) found in humans, in accordance with our own observations in rats and cats, that oniric eye movements may be directed to one side or the other, not exclusively to one side, as stated by Vanni-Mercier and co-workers (29). Another fancy hypothesis is the one that proposes that we dream to forget, in order to delete "unwanted" information by reverse learning or unlearning (118). Jouvet believes that dreaming activity plays a key role during the earliest years of life and thus may be involved in continuously programming some of the most subtle reactions of our consciousness during wakefulness. J Neurophysiol 1938;1:413-30. Petersohn D, Schoch S, Brinkmann DR, Thiel G. The human synapsin II gene promoter. By visually examining the amplitude of theta waves in these examples it seems they vary at random but when the instant variation of voltage is plotted as a function of time, a regular variation appears during the phasic movements (figure 10). The reason for such vegetative adjustments is obviously that the nervous tissue is metabolically very demanding, so much so that 20% of the inspired oxygen goes to the nervous system. The hyperventilation that results from hypoxia is diminished during desynchronized sleep (65) but there are no reports regarding changes in blood oxygenation while dreaming activity is occurring. Recordings of the electrical activity of the brain, which we will refer to as electro-oscillograms, reveal specific patterns that express the phases of sleep in several central regions of the brain, including the phase during which most oniric activity takes place, the desynchronized or paradoxical sleep. Xerxes, in fact, had discovered an important aspect of dreams but his oracle discarded such an explanation, in favor of the mystic one. Narcolepsy. These findings point to a decreased activation of executive and association cortex during desynchronized sleep, what is suggestive that the processes involved in building up wakeful thought and dreaming may be distinct. He properly related such dreams to his concern with that important war. Ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) burst neurons: correlative evidence for neuronal generators of PGO waves. Such hypothesis is grounded on the following steps. The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Therefore, any neural event, be it running or just thinking, or dreaming, requires a large amount of oxygen, which is carried to the nervous system by the blood through powerful hemodynamic adjustments, such as increase in blood pressure, heart rate and central blood flow (21,25,26). This is specially true as to bees, that at night do interrupt their hum, "even if they are exposed to the light of a lantern". Takakusaki K, Ohta y, Mori S. Single medullary reticulospinal neurons exert postsynaptic inhibitory effects via inhibitory interneurons upon alpha-motoneurons innervating cat hindlimb muscles. FOIA J Neurophysiol 1964;27:152-71. 29. In some animals, however, a reduction of heart rate and respiration may occur, what also happens during an attentive wakefulness if they are threatened. J Biol Chem 1995;270:24361-9. These interneurons inhibit motoneurons by means of glycinergic synapses (glycine is a powerful inhibitory neurotransmitter), as shown by Soja et al. Epub 2009 Oct 1. The site is secure. Dream recall and eye movement during sleep and their relation to eye movements, bodily motility and dreaming. Phenomenal dream content, however, is not as disorganized as such views imply. The vegetative components, that are phasic increases of heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, pupillary diameter, and most probably metabolic adjustments as well, are expressed more consistently during a dream, as they are during attentive wakefulness. 56. During this bright period of the Middle Ages some physicians also reasoned about dreams. Raven Press, New york 1981:405-429. Eine Methodik der Ableitung localisierter Potentialschwankungen aus subcortikalen Hirngebieten. 2. Further developments in neurobiological research, including lesion and brain imaging studies, have established a clearer view of the functional neuroanatomy of REM sleep and dreaming. In cats, during movements related to dreams such hyperpolarization is reinforced by presynaptic inhibition of afferents to motoneurons. Although it may happen in any sleep phase, it prevails during the desynchronized phase. The command character of theta waves is probably the reason why such potentials occur almost simultaneously in different brain structures. 93. Consciousness in waking and dreaming: the roles of neuronal oscillation and neuromodulation in determining similarities and differences. Figure 6 shows an increase in heart rate from 150 bpm to 180 bpm (the latter is the normal heart rate during resting wakefulness in this species), coinciding with the peak of eye movements. As such, this explanation may be interpreted as a way of doing something that we should never be allowed to do without paying for it. Vanni-Mercier G, Pelisson D, Goffart L, Sakai K, Jouvet M. Eye saccade dynamics during paradoxical sleep in the cat. De Sanctis, in 1899, in his book I Sogni, Studi Clinici ed Psicologici di un Alienista (Dreams, Clinical and Psychological Studies of a Psychiatrist), cites no less than 323 articles and books dealing with dreams, which proves that the objective study of dreams did not start during the middle of the 20th century, as is usually taken for granted (4). University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1963. Gadea-Ciria M. Plasticity of ponto-geniculo-occipital waves during paradoxical sleep after frontal lobe lesions in the cat. Despite such discrepancies, however, during synchronized sleep PRT studies reveal a decrease in global cerebral energy metabolism relative to both waking and desynchronized sleep. Revonsuo A. 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