Get ready for some mind-blowing news from the neuroscience world: An exhaustive decade-long study into human sleep has revealed that dreaming is your brain’s way of thinking about weird things.
Wow! This is a seriously groundbreaking discovery.
The landmark study, conducted by a team of researchers at Princeton University, utilized cutting-edge imaging technologies to closely examine the brain activity of hundreds of sleeping test subjects, ultimately determining that dreams are essentially the unconscious brain’s way of stitching together wacky thoughts in the middle of the night. By analyzing so-called “posterior cortical hot zones” of individuals experiencing REM sleep, researchers found that when people aren’t dreaming, their brains rarely think about bizarre things like having all your teeth fall out while being chased down a hallway by a very slow tornado, whereas when people are dreaming, these things are pretty much all the brain wants to think about.
“Our scans showed that while humans are sleeping, the brain draws on memories of acquaintances and experiences to come up with weird stuff and then dwell on that weird stuff, and that’s what dreams are,” the study concluded, adding that the brain generally refrains from thinking about normal stuff during dreams because the designated time period for thinking about normal stuff is daytime. “Beyond that, dreams have absolutely no significance or purpose.”
Incredible. What a truly astonishing breakthrough.
The causes and mechanics of dreaming have remained a mystery up until now, but thanks to hardworking neuroscientists, we now know that dreams are just a visual representation of the all the weird shit your brain is thinking about. Science FTW!
