Documentaire why do we dream

Turn on, tune in and drop out on this trip to explore the history and effects of mind-altering substances. Call Netflix Netflix. Starring: Emma Stone, Julianne Moore. Watch all you want. Oscar winner Emma Stone serves as the warm, friendly guide of this deep dive into the complexities of the human brain. Videos The Mind, Explained. Season 2 Trailer: The Mind, Explained. The Mind, Explained Trailer. Episodes The Mind, Explained. Performing surgical experiments on human subjects was, of course, unthinkable, but the discovery of a new brain disease also made it unnecessary.

It prevents the paralysis of REM sleep, so he acts out his dreams. TOM CURSLEY Research Subject : I can picture, now, being in this field, a river in the background, and I don't know, about a dozen cows grazing the grass, and they slowly start coming towards me and nudging me and push me out of the way.

The bedside cabinet went over the other night, and he didn't even know he'd knocked that over. It's just what happens. It starts off with movements that the partner thinks is a bit unusual but nothing special, just kicking and just a bad dream, but it becomes more frequent, more intense and it can be dangerous for the partner and dangerous for the dreamer. In fact a lot of people with this condition end up with nothing in the bedroom at all.

They take out all the bedside tables, all the lamps, all the sharp corners, which might injure themselves. They end up almost in a padded cell. Here, a sleeper puffs on his finger monitor, dreaming it's a cigarette.

In fact, he didn't know how he got up there. He must have been very agile to get up there, very motivated to get that far. Why else would nature go to such lengths to let most of us dream safely? Such a conclusion might have seemed obvious, but by the late '70s, a new theory was roiling psychology. NARRATOR: Dreams, the researchers argued, were more physiological than psychological: the result of our higher brain doing the best it could to make sense of meaningless neural impulses.

And certainly not the psychological purpose that Freud claimed for them. As most other people are heading home, Erica Harris is arriving for work at Boston University. This is when dream researchers frequently start their day. It's very tiring, but we enjoy our work, so we're looking forward to it. This is to measure any different type of muscle movement that he might have at his eyes or at his chin.

We need to measure the brainwaves, because the brainwaves show us a different picture. They look different depending on the different type of sleep that the person goes in. We're going to have a pretty good idea about everything that's going on with him while he's sleeping. You can see the full panoply of characteristics that occur during REM sleep, you know: the paralysis, the eyes darting back and forth. You can put him under a neuroimaging scanner.

You can see the areas of the brain that light up during REM sleep light up, and you can expect them to report a dream when you wake them up, but they may not. Unfortunately, the best way to find out if a person is dreaming is to wake them up and ask them.

And these two dream states may be fundamentally different, affecting us in different ways. We start out with non-REM sleep, beginning with stage 1, light sleep. As we pass into deep sleep, stages 3 and 4, our brainwaves grow increasingly long and slow. Then we begin a return journey, but don't quite make it. Just short of waking comes REM sleep, after which we repeat the cycle, four or five times in a night. And we know that because we see the shape of the brainwaves where they're very close together, like this, and then we see some that are very spiky.

This is the beginning of the transition to the stage in which we want to wake Ross up. As the experiment will reveal, these dreams are different from REM dreams. His answers reflect positive emotions. The next time he's awakened he will be well into REM sleep. McNamara speculates that this shift in mood, detected after Ross's REM dream, can be traced to an ancient structure, the amygdala, found in each hemisphere of our brain.

So if REM sleep is associated with all this unpleasant emotion and you get too much REM, then you are going to have a lot of unpleasant emotion. We call that depression.

He, too, recruits human subjects to sleep over in his lab, but first they get an assignment. He actually controls that character on the screen by moving his feet, and he's learning a lot about how to do it.

And what we think is that as the brain goes to sleep, it's going to come back to these images. I'm trying to beat a time, and I'm trying to stay in between these gates, and it's difficult, but it's a lot of fun. Early on, they're simple re-enactments of the ski game. But as the night passes, they begin to incorporate other memories. JOHN: I was walking through boot prints in the snow—already-made boot prints—like, copying them, going into the ones, stepping into the ones that were already stepped in, like following somebody else's steps along in the snow.

I can just imagine the brain trying to say, "Does what I know about walking in snow help me think about skiing on snow? The next day on the virtual slopes, his performance has clearly improved. Yeah, that's pretty good. And in other studies we have evidence that when they dream about it, those people who dream about it actually end up performing better the next time.

What do they accomplish? And how might the two kinds of dreaming work together? By placing electrodes in a rat's brain, Matt Wilson can read its mind, seeing exactly how its brain cells, or neurons, fire, as it experiences its world, in this case a maze. So wherever the animal is, we see unique patterns of brain activity. But, remarkable as it is to look in on a rodent's inner life, the big payoff comes later.

As the rat sleeps, the patterns recur, seen here as flashes of color superimposed on the maze. It's not moving. It's not interacting with the world. And yet we see a lot of structured activity going on in the brain. And when we look in detail at that activity, we see that these patterns are direct reflections of patterns that we had seen when the animal was awake.

Not simply that there was dreaming going on, but that we had access to this. During non-REM sleep their dreams play out as brief bursts of neural activity, which mirrors past experience compressed into seconds.

I have actually experienced lucid dreamig myself, and I can not describe the feeling. It is, fantastic. I start doing things, conscious. The feeling of freedom, where only your imagination is the limit, is great. In a series of cutting-edge experiments and personal stories, we go in search of the science behind this most enduring mystery and ask: where do dreams come from? Do they have meaning? And ultimately, why do we dream?

What the film What the film reveals is that much of what we thought we knew no longer stands true. Dreams are not sim Read all. Sign In.