The neural correlates of dreaming
By F. Siclari, Benjamin Baird, L. Perogamvros, G. Bernardi, Joshua J. LaRocque, B. Riedner, Melanie Boly, Bradley R. Postle, Giulio Tononi. Nature Neuroscience, 2014
601 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Consciousness never fades during waking. However, when awakened from sleep, we sometimes recall dreams and sometimes recall no experiences. Traditionally, dreaming has been identified with rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, characterized by wake-like, globally 'activated', high-frequency electroencephalographic activity. However, dreaming also occurs in non-REM (NREM) sleep, characterized by prominent low-frequency activity. This challenges our understanding of the neural correlates of conscious experiences in sleep. Using high-density electroencephalography, we contrasted the presence and absence of dreaming in NREM and REM sleep. In both NREM and REM sleep, reports of dream experience were associated with local decreases in low-frequency activity in posterior cortical regions. High-frequency activity in these regions correlated with specific dream contents. Monitoring this posterior 'hot zone' in real time predicted whether an individual reported dreaming or the absence of dream experiences during NREM sleep, suggesting that it may constitute a core correlate of conscious experiences in sleep.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5f3f4e26766fc3b63ca2ec086bea97bc9c7d104
How researchers see this paper
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Jean-Pierre Changeux
- Stanislas Dehaene
- Pieter R. Roelfsema
- George A. Mashour
- Leonardo G. Cohen
- Yoshua Bengio
- Giulio Tononi
- Victor A. F. Lamme
Citations in the corpus
- The spectral exponent of the resting EEG indexes the presence of consciousness during unresponsiveness induced by propofol, xenon, and ketamine (2019, unknown): “Dream reports are indeed commonly employed to study mentation during sleep [46,47].”
- Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis (2020, background): “Recent data suggest that reductions of low-frequency activity in posterior confluence of the sensory and association cortex (the socalled ‘‘hot zone’’ of consciousness) were associated with dreaming during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and nonREM sleep (Siclari et al., 2017).”
- Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans (2025, unknown): “Second, research on serial awakenings during NREM sleep has shown that the likelihood of dream reports can be inferred from the balance between low-and high-frequency power [51].”