Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:08:43.418Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Such stuff as REM and NREM dreams are made on? An elaboration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2013

Sue Llewellyn
Sue Llewellyn*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, Manchester M15 6PB, United Kingdom. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uksue.llewellyn@mbs.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I argued that rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming is elaborative emotional encoding for episodic memories, sharing many features with the ancient art of memory (AAOM). In this framework, during non–rapid eye movement (NREM), dream scenes enable junctions between episodic networks in the cortex and are retained by the hippocampus as indices for retrieval. The commentaries, which varied in tone from patent enthusiasm to edgy scepticism, fall into seven natural groups: debate over the contribution of the illustrative dream and disputes over the nature of dreaming (discussed in sect. R1); how the framework extends to creativity, psychopathology, and sleep disturbances (sect. R2); the compatibility of the REM dream encoding function with emotional de-potentiation (sect. R3); scepticism over similarities between REM dreaming and the AAOM (sect. R4); the function of NREM dreams in the sleep cycle (sect. R5); the fit of the junction hypothesis with current knowledge of cortical networks (sect. R6); and whether the hypothesis is falsifiable (including methodological challenges and evidence against the hypothesis) (sect. R7). Although the groups in sections R1–R6 appear quite disparate, I argue they all follow from the associative nature of dreaming.

Type
Author's Response
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 36 , Issue 6 , December 2013 , pp. 634 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreasen, N. C. (1990) Positive and negative symptoms: Historical and conceptual aspects. Modern Problems of Pharmacopsychiatry 24:1–42.Google Scholar
Bak, P. (1996) How nature works: The science of self-organized criticality. Springer.Google Scholar
Bartlett, F. C. (1932) Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baylor, G. W. & Cavallero, C. (2001) Memory sources associated with REM and NREM dream reports throughout the night: A new look at the data. Sleep 24(2):165–70.Google Scholar
Biddle, W. E. (1963) Images: The objects psychiatrists treat. Archives of General Psychiatry 9(5):464–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bird, C. M. & Burgess, N. (2008) The hippocampus and memory: Insights from spatial processing. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 9(3):182–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Braun, A. R., Balkin, T. J., Wesensten, N. J., Carson, R. E., Varga, M., Baldwin, P., Selbie, S., Belenky, G. & Herscovitch, P. (1997) Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep–wake cycle: An H2 15O PET study. Brain 120:1173–97.Google Scholar
Carruthers, M. & Ziolkowski, J. M. (2002) General introduction. In: The medieval craft of memory: An anthology of texts and pictures, ed. Carruthers, M. & Ziolkowski, J. M., pp. 1–31. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Cercas, J. (2004) Soldiers of Salamis. Penguin. (Original work published 2001 in Spanish as Soldados de Salamina. Tusquets Editores.)Google Scholar
Clemens, Z., Fabó, D. & Halász, P. (2005) Overnight verbal memory retention correlates with the number of sleep spindles. Neuroscience 132:529–35.Google Scholar
Crick, F. & Mitchison, G. (1983) The function of dream sleep. Nature 304(5922):111–14.Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. (1986) The blind watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. Norton.Google Scholar
Dew, I. T. & Cabeza, R. (2011) The porous boundaries between explicit and implicit memory: Behavioral and neural evidence. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1224(1):174–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeYoung, C. G., Grazioplene, R. G. & Peterson, J. B. (2012) From madness to genius: The Openness/Intellect trait domain as a paradoxical simplex. Journal of Research in Personality 46:63–78 Google Scholar
Domhoff, G. W. (2005) The content of dreams: Methodologic and theoretical implications. In: Principles and practices of sleep medicine, 4th edition, ed. Kryger, M. H., Roth, T. & Dement, W. C., pp. 522–34. W. B. Saunders.Google Scholar
Fogel, S. M. & Smith, C. T. (2011) The function of the sleep spindle: A physiological index of intelligence and a mechanism for sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35(5):1154–65.Google Scholar
Foulkes, D. (1982) Children's dreams: Longitudinal studies. Wiley.Google Scholar
Foulkes, D., Hollifield, M., Sullivan, B., Bradley, L. & Terry, R. (1990) REM dreaming and cognitive skills at ages 5–8: A cross-sectional study. International Journal of Behavioral Development 13(4):447–65.Google Scholar
Fuster, J. M. (1999) Memory in the cerebral cortex: An empirical approach to neural networks in the human and nonhuman primate. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gais, S., Mölle, M., Helms, K. & Born, J. (2002) Learning-dependent increases in sleep spindle density. Journal of Neuroscience 22:6830–34.Google Scholar
Grosmark, A. D., Mizuseki, K., Pastalkova, E., Diba, K. & Buzsáki, G. (2012) REM sleep reorganizes hippocampal excitability. Neuron 75(6):1001–1007.Google Scholar
Gupta, A. S., van der Meer, M. A., Touretzky, D. S. & Redish, A. D. (2010) Hippocampal replay is not a simple function of experience. Neuron 65(5):695–705.Google Scholar
Hadjez, J., Stein, D., Gabbay, U., Bruckner, J., Meged, S., Barak, Y., Elizur, A., Weizman, A. & Rotenberg, V. S. (2003) Dream content of schizophrenic, nonschizophrenic mentally ill, and community control adolescents. Adolescence 38(150):331–42.Google ScholarPubMed
Hasher, L. & Zacks, R. T. (1979) Automatic and effortful processes in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108(3):356–88.Google Scholar
Hassabis, D., Chu, C., Rees, G., Weiskopf, N., Molyneux, P. D. & Maguire, E. A. (2009) Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus. Current Biology 19(7):546–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hasselmo, M. E. (2006) The role of acetylcholine in learning and memory. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 16(6):710–15.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. A. (1999b) Dreaming as delirium: How the brain goes out of its mind. The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. A., Pace-Schott, E. F. & Stickgold, R. (2003) Dreaming and the brain: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. In: Sleep and dreaming: Scientific advances and reconsiderations, ed. Pace-Schott, E. F., Solms, M., Blagrove, M. & Harnad, S., pp. 1–50. Cambridge University Press. (First published in the December 2000 Special Issue of BBS on “Sleep and dreaming,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23(6):793–842).Google Scholar
Huron, C., Danion, J. M., Giacomoni, F., Grangé, D., Robert, P. & Rizzo, L. (1995) Impairment of recognition memory with, but not without, conscious recollection in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry 152:1737–42.Google Scholar
Janzen, G. (2006) Memory for object location and route direction in virtual large-scale space. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59(3):493–508.Google Scholar
Janzen, G. & van Turennout, M. (2004) Selective neural representation of objects relevant for navigation. Nature Neuroscience 7(6):673–77.Google Scholar
Janzen, G., Wagensveld, B. & van Turennout, M. (2007) Neural representation of navigational relevance is rapidly induced and long lasting. Cerebral Cortex 17(4):975–81.Google Scholar
Karlsson, M. P. & Frank, L. M. (2008) Network dynamics underlying the formation of sparse, informative representations in the hippocampus. Journal of Neuroscience 28:14271–81.Google Scholar
Kauffman, S. A. (1993) The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kramer, M. & Roth, T. (1973) A comparison of dream content in laboratory dream reports of schizophrenic and depressive patient groups. Comprehensive Psychiatry 14(4):325–29.Google Scholar
Lake, C. R. (2008) Disorders of thought are severe mood disorders: The selective attention defect in mania challenges the Kraepelinian dichotomy – a review. Schizophrenia Bulletin 34(1):109–17.Google Scholar
Laviolette, S. R. (2007) Dopamine modulation of emotional processing in cortical and subcortical neural circuits: Evidence for a final common pathway in schizophrenia? Schizophrenia Bulletin 33(4):971–81.Google Scholar
Lewin, R. (1993) Complexity: Life on the edge. Second edition. Phoenix.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, S. (2009) Is “bipolar disorder” the brain's autopoietic response to schizophrenia? Medical Hypotheses 73(4):580–84.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, S. (2011) If waking and dreaming became dedifferentiated, would schizophrenia result? Consciousness and Cognition 20(4):1059–88.Google Scholar
Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M. & Kapur, N. (2003) Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience 6(1):90–95.Google Scholar
Maquet, P., Peters, J., Aerts, J., Delfiore, G., Degueldre, C., Luxen, A. & Franck, G. (1996) Functional neuroanatomy of human rapid-eye-movement sleep and dreaming. Nature 383(6596):163–66.Google Scholar
Massimini, M., Ferrarelli, F., Huber, R., Esser, S. K., Singh, H. & Tononi, G. (2005) Breakdown of cortical effective connectivity during sleep. Science 309(5744):2228–32.Google Scholar
Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition. D. Reidel.Google Scholar
McDermott, K. B., Szpunar, K. K., & Christ, S. E. (2009) Laboratory-based and autobiographical retrieval tasks differ substantially in their neural substrates. Neuropsychologia 47(11):2290–98.Google Scholar
Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review 83(4):435–50.Google Scholar
Neisser, U. (1962) Cultural and cognitive discontinuity. In: Anthropology and human behavior, ed. Gladwin, T. E. & Sturtevant, W., pp. 54–71. Anthropological Society of Washington.Google Scholar
Nielsen, T. A. & Stenstrom, P. (2005) What are the memory sources of dreaming? Nature 437:1286–89.Google Scholar
O'Keefe, J. & Nadel, L. (1978) The hippocampus as a cognitive map. Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Orsucci, F. F. (2006) The paradigm of complexity in clinical neurocognitive science. Neuroscientist 12:390–97.Google Scholar
Perogamvros, L. & Schwartz, S. (2012) The roles of the reward system in sleep and dreaming. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36(8):1934–51.Google Scholar
Pochon, J. B., Levy, R., Poline, J. B., Crozier, S., Lehéricy, S., Pillon, B., Deweer, B., Le Bihan, D. & Dubois, B. (2001) The role of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the preparation of forthcoming actions: An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex 11(3):260–66.Google Scholar
Rauchs, G., Desgranges, B., Foret, J. & Eustache, F. (2005) The relationships between memory systems and sleep stages. Journal of Sleep Research 14:123–40.Google Scholar
Reber, P. J., Knowlton, B. J. & Squire, L. R. (1996) Dissociable properties of memory systems: Differences in the flexibility of declarative and nondeclarative knowledge. Behavioral Neuroscience 110(5):861–71.Google Scholar
Rolls, E. T. (2007) An attractor network in the hippocampus: Theory and neurophysiology. Learning and Memory 14:714–31.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E. & McClelland, J. L. (1986) Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition, vol. 1: Foundations. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Scarone, S., Manzone, M. L., Gambini, O., Kantzas, I., Limosani, I., D'Agostino, A. & Hobson, J. A. (2008) The dream as a model for psychosis: An experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. Schizophrenia Bulletin 34(3):515–22.Google Scholar
Schachtel, E. (1947) On memory and childhood amnesia. Psychiatry 10:1–26.Google Scholar
Schacter, D. L. & Addis, D. R. (2007a) Constructive memory: The ghosts of past and future. Nature 445(7123):27.Google Scholar
Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R. & Buckner, R. L. (2007) Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 8:657–61.Google Scholar
Schredl, M. (2011) Dream research in schizophrenia: Methodological issues and a dimensional approach. Consciousness and Cognition 20(4):1036–41.Google Scholar
Smith, C. (1993) REM sleep and learning: Some recent findings. In: The functions of dreaming, ed. Moffitt, A., Kramer, M. & Hoffman, R., pp. 341–62. SUNY (State University of New York) Press.Google Scholar
Smith, C. (2010) Sleep states, memory processing, and dreams. Sleep Medicine Clinics 5:217–28.Google Scholar
Smith, C. T., Nixon, M. R. & Nader, R. S. (2004) Posttraining increases in REM sleep intensity implicate REM sleep in memory processing and provide a biological marker of learning potential. Learning and Memory 11(6):714–19.Google Scholar
Solms, M. (1997) The neuropsychology of dreams: A clinical–anatomical study. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Solms, M. (2003b) Forebrain mechanisms of dreaming are activated from a variety of sources. In Sleep and dreaming: Scientific advances and reconsiderations, ed. Pace-Schott, E. F., Solms, M., Blagrove, M. & Harnad, S., pp. 247–52. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 2000 in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23:1035–40.)Google Scholar
Solms, M. & Turnbull, O. (2002) The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of the subjective experience. Other Press.Google Scholar
Spaniol, J., Davidson, P. S., Kim, A. S., Han, H., Moscovitch, M. & Grady, C. L. (2009) Event-related fMRI studies of episodic encoding and retrieval: Meta-analyses using activation likelihood estimation. Neuropsychologia 47(8):1765–79.Google Scholar
Spoormaker, V. I., Schröter, M. S., Gleiser, P. M., Andrade, K. C., Dresler, M., Wehrle, R., Sämann, P. G. & Czisch, M. (2010) Development of a large-scale functional brain network during human non-rapid eye movement sleep. Journal of Neuroscience 30(34):11379–87.Google Scholar
Stickgold, R., Scott, L., Rittenhouse, C. & Hobson, J. A. (1999) Sleep-induced changes in associative memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11:182–93.Google Scholar
Stickgold, R., Whidbee, D., Schirmer, B., Patel, V. & Hobson, J. A. (2000) Visual discrimination task improvement: A multi-step process occurring during sleep. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12(2):246–54.Google Scholar
Sullivan, G. M., Coplan, J. D., Kent, J. M. & Gorman, J. M. (1999) The noradrenergic system in pathological anxiety: A focus on panic with relevance to generalized anxiety and phobias. Biological Psychiatry 46(9):1205–18.Google Scholar
Szpunar, K. K., Watson, J. M. & McDermott, K. B. (2007) Neural substrates of envisioning the future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104(2):642–47.Google Scholar
Tamminen, J., Payne, J. D., Stickgold, R., Wamsley, E. J. & Gaskell, M. G. (2010) Sleep spindle activity is associated with the integration of new memories and existing knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience 30(43):14356–60.Google Scholar
Tendolkar, I., Ruhrmann, S., Brockhaus, A., Pukrop, R. & Klosterkotter, J. (2002) Remembering or knowing: Electrophysiological evidence for an episodic memory deficit in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine 32(7):1261–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tulving, E. (1993) What is episodic memory? Current Directions in Psychological Science 2(3):67–70.Google Scholar
van Marle, H. J. F., Hermans, E. J., Qin, S., Overeem, S. & Fernández, G. (2013) The effect of exogenous cortisol during sleep on the behavioral and neural correlates of emotional memory consolidation in humans. Psychoneuroendocrinology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2013.01.009.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vann, S. D., Aggleton, J. P., & Maguire, E. A. (2009) What does the retrosplenial cortex do?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10(11):792–802 .Google Scholar
Varela, F. G., Maturana, H. R. & Uribe, R. (1974) Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. Biosystems 5:187–96.Google Scholar
Walker, M. P. & van Der Helm, E. (2009) Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin 135(5):731–48.Google Scholar
Wamsley, E. J. & Stickgold, R. (2011) Memory, sleep and dreaming: Experiencing consolidation. Sleep Medicine Clinics 6(1):97–108.Google Scholar
Wamsley, E. J., Tucker, M., Payne, J. D., Benavides, J. A. & Stickgold, R. (2010) Dreaming of a learning task is associated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Current Biology 20:850–55.Google Scholar
Waydo, S., Kraskov, A., Quiroga, Q. R., Fried, I. & Koch, C. (2006) Sparse representation in the human medial temporal lobe. Journal of Neuroscience 26(40):10232–34.Google Scholar
Yu, C. K.-C. (2006) Memory loss is not equal to loss of dream experience: A clinicoanatomical study of dreaming in patients with posterior brain lesions. Neuropsychoanalysis 8:191–98.Google Scholar
Zanasi, M., Calisti, F., Di Lorenzo, G., Valerio, G. & Siracusano, A. (2011) Oneiric activity in schizophrenia: Textual analysis of dream reports. Consciousness and Cognition 20:337–48.Google Scholar