夢の機関

Nicola Davis “Scientists identify parts of brain involved in dreaming” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/10/scientists-identify-parts-of-brain-involved-in-dreaming


ウィスコンシン大学「睡眠と意識研究センター」*1の研究者たちは、夢の生成に関与する脳の部位を特定した*2。それよりも、夢は今まで考えられていたようにレム睡眠時だけでなくノンレム睡眠の間でも生成されることが今回明らかになったということが吃驚。心理学の教科書は改訂を余儀なくされるだろうし、心理学の先生方も講義ノートを急遽書き換えなければならなくなるだろう。


Dreaming had long been thought to occur largely during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, a period of slumber involving fast brain activity similar to that when awake, but dreams have also been reported to occur during non-REM sleep, leaving scientists scratching their heads as to the hallmark of dreaming.

“It seemed a mystery that you can have both dreaming and the absence of dreaming in these two different types of stages,” said Francesca Siclari*3, co-author of the research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.


Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Siclari and colleagues from the US, Switzerland and Italy, reveal how they carried out a series of experiments involving 46 participants, each of whom had their brain activity recorded while they slept by electroencephalogram (EEG) – a noninvasive technique that involved placing up to 256 electrodes on the scalp and face to monitor the number and size of brainwaves of different speeds.

While the experiments probed different aspects of the puzzle, all involved participants being woken at various points throughout the night and asked to report whether they had been dreaming. “Overall in the whole experiment we did over 1,000 awakenings,” said Siclari.

If the participants had been dreaming, they were asked how long they thought it had lasted and whether they could remember anything about their dream, such as whether it involved faces, movement or thinking, or whether it was instead a vivid, sensory experience.

Analysis of the EEG recording reveal that dreaming was linked to a drop in low-frequency activity in a region at the back of the brain dubbed by the researchers the “posterior cortical hot zone” – a region that includes visual areas as well as areas involved in integrating the senses. The result held regardless of whether the dream was remembered or not and whether it occurred during REM or non-REM sleep.

The researchers also looked at changes in high-frequency activity in the brain, finding that dreaming was linked to an increase in such activity in the so-called “hot zone” during non-REM sleep. Further, the team identified the region of the brain which appears to be important in remembering what a dream was about, finding that this recall was linked toan increase in high-frequency activity towards the front of the brain. A similar pattern of activity was seen in the hot zone and beyond for dreams during REM sleep. The upshot is that dreaming is rooted in the same changes in brain activity regardless of the type of sleep.


The authors say the study could help shed light on the nature of consciousness, revealing what happens in the brain during sleep when we switch from being unconscious to having conscious experiences. This is hugely valuable, they add, since there are myriad complicating factors involved in comparing wakefulness versus an anaesthetised state.

The findings, adds Siclari, are surprising. “It only seems to need a very circumscribed, a very restricted activation of the brain to generate conscious experiences,” she said. “Until now we thought that large regions of the brain needed to be active to generate conscious experiences.”

*1:http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/index.html

*2:Francesca Siclari, Benjamin Baird, Lampros Perogamvros, Giulio Bernardi, Joshua J LaRocque, Brady Riedner, Melanie Boly, Bradley R Postle & Giulio Tononi “The neural correlates of dreaming” http://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4545.epdf Also “Activity in the Brain's 'Hot Zone' Predicts Dreams During Sleep” http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/activity-in-the-brains-hot-zone-predicts-dreams-during-sleep/50715

*3:See eg. http://www.chuv.ch/sommeil/cirs_home/cirs-en-bref/cirs-nos_collaborateurs/cirs-dr_francesca_siclari.htm