While we sleep, the mind absorbs emotions and transforms thoughts into memories, causing us to dream bizarre and unbelievable things. The mind closes down so completely at the deepest stage of sleep that brain poisons are physically removed, and chemicals are released to rebuild and renew the entire body.
We are completely lost.
Or do we?
Sleep still holds a great deal of mystery. We dream because… How are people able to drive, drive, cook, or even have sex when they are asleep? Heck, people can even pick up new words while they are sound asleep. Unconsciousness and consciousness are clearly not mutually exclusive. And things only became fuzzier.
According to new research, seemingly anyone can hear and comprehend vocal commands while they are sleeping and dreaming, and some people can accomplish this even when they are in the deepest stage of sleep when their brain waves have slowed to a crawl. According to research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, they are capable of listening, processing, and responding with a smile or a frown.
According to study team member Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Paris Brain Institute, “Wakefulness and sleep are not stable states.” Instead, “we can characterize them as a mosaic of seemingly unconscious and conscious moments.”
We need a little history of the study that inspired these new experiments in order to comprehend the uniqueness and significance of the results.
compromising dreams
In earlier research, Naccache’s coworkers and different teams in the US, Germany, and the Netherlands experimented on lucid dreamers — people who are conscious that they are sleeping while having vivid dreams and who occasionally have control over the story of their own dreams. The REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep, when dreams are most frequent, is when lucid dreaming occurs.
About 20% of these lucid dreamers were able to correctly perform some basic math calculations and react with their eyes to spoken yes-or-no questions after the scientists hacked into their dreams.
