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تناتن
تناتن
It was these eye movements that gave the state its name:
Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep.
But what was REM sleep for? The answer seemed to come
from the sleepers themselves.
This cat looks as if it's awake; in fact, it's deep in REM sleep.
This dog appears to be running; it too is in REM sleep, and, like
the cat, dreaming.
TECHNICIAN: Hello.
ROSS: Hi.
NARRATOR: But even with all this technology, there is still only
one way to find out if Ross is dreaming.
NARRATOR: It's now 11:00, and Ross has nodded off, which
means his brain has begun to cycle through the five stages of
sleep.
ERICA HARRIS: Right now, what we can see is that he's in non-
REM sleep. 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.
ERICA HARRIS: So the first thing that he's working on right now
is a mood questionnaire, and basically he might see three
letters like O, P, T, and he's supposed to complete some kind of
word for that.
NARRATOR: The words Ross chooses will reveal how he's
feeling about himself after non-REM dreaming. His answers
reflect positive emotions.
Five a.m.
JOHN: I was kind of hitting the wall, coming up on this part, but
I'll see if I can avoid it. Yeah, that's pretty good.
MATT WILSON: So the animal is asleep. 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.
MATT WILSON: And I think that was really the moment of great
insight. Not simply that there was dreaming going on, but that
we had access to this.
MATT WILSON: And when you think about the challenge that
animals, that we as humans and the brain in general faces, it is
the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the
opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because
the consequences are simply things don't work out as you
might have expected, and then you wake up.
NARRATOR: And the story goes that Dr. Frankenstein and his
monster were dreamed up by Mary Shelley.
SARA MEDNICK: The reason why we think that REM sleep helps
you with creativity is because REM sleep is a very active time in
your brain. Sometimes your brain can even be more active than
during waking. And you actually have these different areas of
the brain that are speaking to each other. So it's actually able to
start to free associate amongst its own ideas and memories.