Why are dreams forgotten?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

You spend a third of your life asleep, much of which is dreaming. But more often than not, you don't remember any of your dreams. And even on those happy days when you wake up with the memory of a dream, there is every chance that in a minute or two everything will disappear. Start you just as often forget something from everyday life - an excuse to visit a therapist as soon as possible. But forgetting dreams is okay. Damn it, why ?!

Neuroscientists from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, assure that even those who claim they don't dream of anything at all, just forget their dreams faster than others. Research shows that recalling a dream is possible; you just need to wake up at the right time.

At the moment, this mechanism is still poorly understood, but scientists have gained some understanding of the work of memory during sleep, which allows at least partially explain our special forgetfulness.

Not all areas of the brain are turned off at the same time. The researchers found that one of the last to "knock out" the hippocampus, a structure that is critical for moving information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

If the hippocampus is the last to fall asleep, it may well be the last to wake up, which is logical. That is, in the morning you find yourself in a certain window: your dream is in short-term memory, but since the hippocampus is still resting, the brain is not able to store information.

This explains why dreams do not linger in our memory, but it does not mean that the hippocampus is inactive all night. During some stages of sleep, the hippocampus sends information to the cortex and does not receive it. Unidirectional communication allows the transfer of memories from the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex for long-term storage, but new information is not recorded.

Upon awakening, the brain may take at least a couple of minutes to fully "boot". In a 2017 study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, French researchers monitored sleep patterns in 36 people.

Half of them remembered their dreams almost every day, while the other half remembered practically nothing. Scientists found that the first group woke up more often at night: awakenings lasted an average of two minutes.

Our poor ability to capture new memories during sleep is also associated with changes in the levels of two neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, which are especially important for memory retention. When we fall asleep, the content of acetylcholine and norepinephrine drops sharply.

Then something strange happens when we enter the REM sleep stage, exactly the one in which the most vivid dreams "spin". At this stage, acetylcholine returns to wakefulness and norepinephrine remains low.

Scientists speculate that this combination of neurotransmitters is the cause of increased forgetfulness during sleep. An increase in acetylcholine levels puts the cerebral cortex in an agitated state, similar to wakefulness, and low levels of norepinephrine reduce our ability to retain memories.

Do you remember what you thought about this morning during breakfast? A soup of many thoughts is constantly being cooked in our head, but we discard most of them as irrelevant information.

Dreams, especially positive dreams, can look like useless thoughts and are perceived by the brain as junk. Brighter, more emotional and more consistent dreams, especially nightmares, are much better remembered: they cause more excitement, and their linear storytelling makes it easier to save.

Scientists from the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School have found several tricks that can keep the memory of a dream alive.

First, you can drink water before bed. This will make you wake up at night and fire up the hippocampus. However, such a trick will affect the quality of your sleep: frequent awakenings prevent the body from effectively restarting all systems.

Second, doctors have found that repeatedly reminding yourself before bed that you want to remember the dream can actually help. When you wake up, try to keep the information about the dream as long as possible: keep your eyes closed, stay still, and reproduce the dreams until your hippocampus catches up and stores all the information properly.