It turns out people who sleep well and those who sleep poorly have different kinds of thoughts before bed.
Some people don’t have the ability to create mental images, a condition called aphantasia, but can still experience visual imagery in their dreams.
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People with aphantasia are unable to deliberately bring to mind mental images. Understanding the mechanisms of aphantasia reveals that different types of cognition exist.
Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist.
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By learning what parts of the brain are crucial for imagination to work, neuroscientists can look back over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to figure out when it first emerged.
Do your eyes play a role in where you look in your dreams?
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Yuta Senzai, University of California, San Francisco and Massimo Scanziani, University of California, San Francisco
Why your eyes move during the REM stage of sleep has puzzled scientists for years. Researchers measured mice brains to look for a possible explanation.
Emile Bernard’s 1888 painting ‘Madeleine in the Bois d'Amour.’
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During times of stress and anxiety we either dream more or remember our dreams more often, as a way of coping with challenging circumstances and new information.
Scientists have a few ideas about where dreams come from – but nobody knows for sure.
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Niamh, age 7, wants to know why we have scary dreams. But after 200 years of study, dreams are still very much a mystery.
Rosie Tasman Napurrurla, Warlpiri 2002, Ngurlu Jukurrpa (‘Grass Seed; Bush Grain Dreaming’), line etching on Hahnemuhle paper.
Warnayaka Art Centre, Lajamanu, and Aboriginal Art Prints Network, Sydney
The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Our Languages Matter”. Aboriginal languages under threat across Australia. Read a Warlpiri introduction to Dreamtime and The Dreaming.