How Memory Affects The Brain

Methods: The participants, all males age 23-32, slept in a dark, quiet lab while their brain waves and eye movements were recorded. They were not aloud to sleep at all during the day when they were not in the lab because they might dream. To establish a base for the experiment, participants in the study were allowed to sleep normally for a few nights. The next few nights the participants were fully awaken every time that they started to dream. The next section was the recovery phase where they could sleep normally followed by more nights where they would be woken between

Although newborn infants spend about half of their sixteen to eighteen hours of sleep time a day in REM sleep, adults spend only about an hour and a half in REM sleep. (1) This difference in both amount and percentage of REM sleep between infants and adults indicates the importance of REM sleep, or of dreams, in development. Several dream researchers have hypothesized that REM sleep may play an important role in infant brain development by providing an internal source of powerful stimulation which would prepare the baby for the almost infinite "world of stimulation it will soon have to face" and also by facilitating the "maturation of the nervous system." (1)

Memory plays a big role in our life. It is the processes by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Everything we see, we do, we think, will goes to memory and transform to implicit or explicit memory. Which will be saved in our brain. We could recall it anytime, even I’m using my implicit memory to type this report. Simply, our daily life is formed by memory, without it, we’re nothing. Why? If we don’t have memory, we can’t learn.

Lucid Dreaming is an important research findings in psychology today because it shows how much your conscious mind is capable of during sleeping. Reasons that support this includes, reducing nightmares, having control over your consciousness, and being able to make sleeping

Nishida, M., Pearsall, J., Buckner, R. L., & Walker, M. P. (2009). REM sleep, prefrontal theta, and the consolidation of human emotional memory. Cerebral Cortex, 19(5), 1158-1166.

However, memory storing is when information comes into memory system and stored in specific brain cells. The hippocampus is the most magnificent element in memory. In fact, the hippocampus is located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain (Ananya, 2014). Also new memories are stored in hippocampus without hippocampus the brain cannot store or retrieved memories (According to the scientific of America, 2009). Furthermore, there are three ways in which memories can be store by visual, acoustic, and semantic. For instance, people memorize a phone number when they have looked up in phone book if so they using visual coding, but if they repeating it after looked up they probably using acoustic coding (Mclead, 2007). Memory is stored by a small

On the other hand, there is not an exact or one percent proved explanation in scientific terms on why or how dreams occur; however, many erudite have developed theories on why they might happen. Many of them include an area of our brain that activates the dream imagery while sleeping. Allan Hobson, Harvard Medical School professor, stated in his activation-synthesis model that as soon as the dreamer enters REM sleep, which is the state where dreams are said to occur the most, a signal of electrochemical pulse changes is sent out from the brainstem and activates the dreamer’s visual perception. After this signal is sent out, the forebrain responds by putting significant effort in creating a gibberish story in the dreamer’s mind.

TRANSITION: Now that we saw what functions in the brain during a dream we can better understand the significance

This is how the brain stores them. “Memories are encoded in the neurons that created them: for example, sounds in the auditory cortex and emotions in the Amygdala. The Hippocampus pulls them together.” (Carter, pg. 161). There are two types of memories that are stored in the brain, long-term memory and short-term memory.

In modern day times the book Sleep and Dreaming creates an interesting hypothesis for the purpose of dreams. Antti Revonsuo writes, “I put forward the hypothesis that the biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance” (Pace-Shott 85). This scientific research hypothesis brings up the idea that the functions of dreams are more important than just reliving high school

Remembering past events is such a fascinating process the human brain creates, known as memories. Recalling delightful experiences make living ecstatic, however; remembering the tragic events can make living miserable. Recollecting the pleasant and forgetting the unpleasant memories, both are essential for normal living. This makes memory is a tool that is crucial to the daily lives of human beings. People believe memories are accurate and precise; however, memories are not like a video camera, making them unreliable. The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body and a memory is just a small fraction of its function. What is memory and how can Alzheimer’s affect a memory?

Allan Hobson proposed neuroscience perspective(all the sciences) of the dream, the activation-synthesis theory explains that dreams are a result of “the electrical energy that the brain produces during REM sleep, possibly as a result of changes in the production of particular neurotransmitters.” The electrical energy randomly triggers the memories stored in the brain because the brain tries to “make sense of neutral activity” that happens during sleep. The brain tries to put the event that occurred in chronological order to make a logical story “ filling in the gaps to produce a rational

The average person spends more than one-third of their life sleeping, and over this period of time he or she can have as many as 1,825 dreams (Wicklinski). By definition, dreams are mental images, thoughts, or emotions that are experienced while sleeping. In the beginning, dreams were thought to be messages sent from the gods or spirit world. Researchers now have many theories explaining why people dream. Many of these theories believe that dreams can resemble an individual’s sensory experiences or even secret wishes. All people dream, but only forty-two percent can recall their dreams from the night before (“Dreams”). Dreaming is important because it can impact people’s health, provide insight into what they are feeling, and reveal

“A night of sleep is as much preparation for the subsequent day’s activity as it is recovery from that of the previous day” -Allan Hobson. The science behind dreaming has been an unexplained controversy for many years, however, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley presented a theory called activation-synthesis model of dreaming to explain how millions of people drift off into a dream. According to these psychiatrists, the “REM sleep triggers neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which our sleeping brain weaves into stories.” Their constructed hypothesis describe my dreams and how they correlate to my memories from my day.

Dreams are sophisticated, powerful, primal works of art created by your inner healer and artist: the unconscious. Your hidden artist weaves past, present and future into intricate and bizarre patterns that on the surface may seem to make no sense, and yet are strangely compelling. From its unlimited palette of