Dream Architecture: Breaching Reality's Borders | VolumeUP

Everybody sleeps at night. Everybody dreams. And some people recall their dreams. But what is actually happening during dreamtime? And how does this mysterious phenomena impact our daily lives? To get a grasp on the subject, it's important to understand the science of sleep.

During a typical night's rest, people go through four to five 90-minute sleep cycles, and each cycle consists of four individual stages of sleep. An easy way to ensure waking up refreshed is to try to wake up at the end of a cycle, not in the middle. For example, getting 6, 7.5, or 9 hours of sleep would each be at the end of a cycle.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Sleep and regular sleep-wake cycles are critical in regulating the development of various hormones and getting enough deep sleep is critical for maximizing strength training gains and regenerating cells to repair tissue and bone, as well as stimulating blood flow to muscles for recovery. In fact, deep sleep is responsible for the production of 95 percent of growth hormone.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, it is recommended that teenagers get 8–10 hours of sleep per night, 7–9 hours for adults (18–64), and 7–8 hours for older adults (65+).

Studies show that sleeping less than 6 hours a night increases mortality and health outcomes such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and obesity.

On the other hand, sleep duration of over 9 hours has been correlated with more significant mortality and increased mortality, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, stroke, coronary heart disease, and obesity

Overall, consensus assessments of over a thousand scientific articles have revealed that the sweet spot for most people is ideally between 7 and 7.5 hours.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

As we go about our day, we constantly experience and adapt to the world around us, learning and growing. Our experiences continually shape our worldview, and our brains are continuously changing as a result.

Research suggests that sleep helps learning and memory in two distinct ways. First, a sleep-deprived person cannot focus attention optimally and therefore cannot learn efficiently. Second, sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is essential for learning new information.

New events become electrical impulses that spread through the hippocampus's neural networks, an area of the brain responsible for the formation of new memories. These impulses, or new memories, change synaptic connections, making some more potent and others weaker.

For something to become a memory, three functions must occur:

Neurons oscillate between a depolarized on-state when they fire and a hyperpolarized off-state when they are silent during deep non-REM sleep. A recent study found that opposing brain waves known as delta and slow-oscillation serve two distinct functions during this down-regulation. Delta waves inhibit memory formation, while slow-oscillation waves do the encoding.

A recent study found that language learning can be enhanced during slow-oscillation wave periods. The study showed that at the peak of these slow-oscillation waves, word associations are registered and encoded. On the other hand, research has shown that delta waves proliferate in brains with amyloid plaque buildup, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.

When awake, learning occurs. When asleep, sorting and processing occur based on relevance and future expectations of usefulness so that essential memories are easier to retrieve for future use.

The brain has a more difficult time absorbing and recalling new information when it lacks adequate sleep. According to research, better sleep quality, duration, and consistency are all linked to higher academic performance.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Dreams are most common during REM sleep, but they can occur at any stage of sleep. Non-REM and REM sleep dreams, on the other hand, appear to follow different patterns.

REM dreams are more imaginative, immersive, and nonsensical, enhancing the integration of unassociated information for creative problem-solving.

This fluid interpretation is at the heart of a creative mind while dreaming; working without rules to create and imagine the unimaginable. In fact, many of the world's most significant inventions and discoveries were inspired by ideas and inspirations that came to them in their dreams.

In 1619, a young soldier stationed in Germany had three dreams involving spirits, including an evil spirit and the holy spirit. That soldier was Rene Descartes, and those dreams gave rise to dualism.

In 1845, Elias Howe invented the sewing machine. He had been thinking about making a device with a needle that would go through cloth, and he had a dream that provided some newfound inspiration. In his dream, Elias was surrounded by cannibals who were about to be cooked and eaten. While observing them dance around a fire with spears moving up and down, he noticed a hole at the tops. When he awoke, he realized that a hole in the needle close to the point, rather than the other end, provided the solution he was looking for, making the mechanical sewing machine a technological possibility.

In 1953, a young molecular biologist had a dream involving a spiral. That spiral served as an inspiration for the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure. Imagination and creativity are inextricably linked, and human progress is directly proportional to both.

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