11.08.09
Dreams as a learning tool
Ewen Callaway writing in New Scientist:
FREUD thought that dreams reveal unfulfilled sexual desires – but if slumbering video game players are anything to go by, their job is to help us learn new skills.
"It really looks like if you’re not dreaming about it, you’re not getting better," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School. He led one of two gaming studies that strongly suggest that dreaming and learning are intertwined.
That sleep aids learning and memory is well known. Whether the specific content of dreams plays a role in this process was not. To investigate, Sidarta Ribeiro and André Pantoja of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil turned to the visceral, monster-filled, first-person shoot-’em-up game Doom.
They persuaded 22 volunteers to …
