The Wonders of Sleep

                Sleep can do many things for a person. It can serve as a way to get away and relax, refresh, and replenish your body of all the days’ hard work. But did you know it also triggers once lost memories? During your lifetime you will make many memories but soon forget about them, never remembering what happened exactly your 7th birthday or even what you did last weekend. As we sleep we dream, many of those dreams become forgotten within a short time but can also remind you of once lived memories.

                Neurologists have proven with multiple studies that when you are sleeping your brain can reach an important occurrence in your life and recognize its details of its events. To increase your chances of remembering you can distinguish it with a distinct odor or sound. If that smell or sound passes through, it triggers the memory lobe of your brain and connects it with the thought. Also, things with a higher-value will be easier to obtain because you needed to memorize it for say money or a prize. The more you practice the memorization of that thought, the easier it will be for it to make reappearance.

The most common dream to have is one that brings emotion to an individual. Most things we remember are ones that affected us in a way that hurt us or made us excited and happy. For that reason we replay that remembrance which then gives it a higher opportunity to be reached once again.  Along with emotion, fear can also occur in a memory dream. Fear is yet another importance that keeps our minds occupied and worried. This is where it becomes most common for people of all ages, especially children, to produce a sleeping disorder.

sleeping man

Sleeping disorders are curable however, in a way that seems quite ironic. The way to cure it: sleep.  It can serve as a treatment to phobias by erasing the memory and then manipulating it into something more enjoyable. Along with being able to trigger memories with a smell or sound, the same thing can help treatment when using exposure therapy. For example, if you listen to a song and it automatically brings you to a memory; you can listen to that same song and adjust it to bring back a new one. You may be wondering how sleep can completely adjust a dream into something else. The answer to that is the occurrence of one group of neurons silencing another group of neurons. When this happens, the group being silenced is being interrupted to switch and manipulate the new memory. Perismatic inhibitory synapses could also be used in correcting and defining the meaning of your fear and fixing it.

                Dreams are activated by memories of once lived occasions, whether emotional or fearful. The amygdala serves as the purpose for this to happen and can help you better understand what is exactly going on. With this exposure therapy, it can help a sleeping disorder by eventually teaching you how to control the fear once you have grasped the meaning of it. Without it you can cause potential anxiety and/or posttraumatic stress (PTSD). Dreams can vary from giving you nightmares to waking you up with a pleasant thought of a happy time. Either way it is more than likely that by the time you wake up, that dream will have been forgotten. So just remember how fast you can spark a memory and then watch at how quickly it will be forgotten once more. Memories can last a lifetime, so make sure to hold on to them.

Human_brain

 Further questions:

  1. When I have nightmares, does that mean I am remembering a bad memory?
  2. How do I control my memory in my dreams and change it to something else?
  3. Are all of my dreams memories from the past?

 

 

1 thought on “The Wonders of Sleep

  1. This was a very interesting topic and I am glad I found it. Sleep to me is always an interesting topic. I found the function of dreams tells us that dreams are the brain’s way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information. Basically it means that our brain is going through processes and that the memories we see are from our brain going through these resent things. I find that very intriguing. I liked this blog it taught me something very interesting.

    http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/dreams-are-key-to-memory/13157.html

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