Learn While You Dream

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Friday, April 23, 2010, 15:11

Psychology has yet not reached to a perfect definition for dream. Some researchers say that dream is the playback of all that we have witnessed in the day, another research say that we dream about our surroundings and some believe that dreams are the reflection of our sub conscious mind.

A new research claims that dreams boost learning. According to researchers of the study, people who take a nap and dream about a task they've learned end up performing it better than people who have not slept or people who have slept but not dreamt over it.

To reach this conclusion, researchers had done an experiment on a group of people. They were asked to watch a three dimension maze on a computer so that they could find their way to a landmark (a tree) when they were plopped down at a random location in five hours of time.

It was noticed that people who were allowed to take a nap and had dreamt about it, reached the location on time.

"We at first thought that dreaming must reflect the memory process that's improving performance. But when you look at the content of the dreams, it was hard to argue that," said Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.

After the experiment the candidates were asked what they had dreamt about. Some participants recalled just the music from the computer maze.

One subject reported to be dreaming about people at particular checkpoints in the maze, even though the real maze didn't have any people or checkpoints.

Another said he dreamt about a bat caves which looked like the maze.

"We think that the dreams are a marker that the brain is working on the same problem at many levels. The dreams might reflect the brain's attempt to find associations for the memories that could make them more useful in the future," Stickgold said.

This does not say that dreams led to better memory, it rather proves that when we are asleep, our unconscious mind tries to wok out the problem. It can be concluded that dreams are essentially a side effect of that memory process.