By Lexi P
Many researchers are on their way to finding out why dreams are so hard to remember. You would think that your dreams would always be perfectly clear and easy for you to recite out loud the next day because you were the one who experienced it, and most of the times your dreams are very realistic. Scientists have done many tests to see the precise communication across brain areas during sleep. They have listened in on the “chatter between neurons in various parts of the brain. These researchers are from the California Institute of Technology, and are now starting to understand how memories are formed, transformed as well as stored in the brain, and how this happens through different stages of sleep.
Scientists know that memories are formed in the brain’s hippocampus, but are stored in other places, somewhere in the outer layer of the brain. They have found that transferring memories from one part of the brain to the other may need some strength of the connections between neurons, as well as timing of the firing of cells in the brain.
Casimir Wierzynski, a Caltech graduate student in computation and neural systems found how connections between neurons will strengthen if they are neurons in the hippocampus fires consistently before the neuron in the neocortex. This information is very important in finding out why we can not remember dreams 5 seconds after we have them.
By the study of rats, Athanassios Siapas, a Bren Scholar in the Caltech Division of Biology used a high-tech recording and computational techniques to listen in on the firing of neurons in their brain. This technique helped them to point out where the firing needed to be done at the same time.
This could not only be helpful in remembering dreams but also situations to remember directions or to help out short term or long term memory, and a link to memory and sleep. We as humans have very strong memories, and there is a confusion as to why we can not make the connection to sleep and memory.
Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225132249.htm
