According to a new study, eye movements in REM sleep mimic gazes in the dream world.When our eyes move during REM sleep, we’re looking at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco . The findings shed light not only on how we dream, but also on how our imaginations work.
“We showed that these eye movements aren’t random. They’re coordinated with what’s happening in the virtual dream world of the mouse,” said Massimo Scanziani, PhD, senior author on the study, which was published in the August 25, 2022, issue of the journal“This work gives us a glimpse into the ongoing cognitive processes in the sleeping brain and at the same time solves a puzzle that’s triggered the curiosity of scientists for decades,” he said.
“One of our strengths as humans is this capacity to combine our real-world experiences with other things that don’t exist at the present moment and may never exist,” he said. “This generative ability of our brain is the basis of our creativity.” Scanziani’s research team discovered that the same parts of the brain — and there are many of them — coordinate during both dreaming and wakefulness, lending credence to the idea that dreams are a way of integrating information gathered throughout the day.
Trying to focus on a face in a dream, I find very hard.