Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Current Event #2


Dreaming makes perfect

Sleeping? No! That's what a teenager would say if u asked them. There are lots if kind of dreams. There are fantastical, boring, weird and a lot more. No one actually knows why we are dreaming, but some dreams can be related to studying something new. Scientists made new studies, in a connection between sleeping-time dreams are better memory in people if they learned something new. So just practice, practice, practices, and start sleeping on it. :) (WARNING: This doesn't mean you’re allowed to sleep during class!) In this study 99 college student the age of 18-30 each spend an hour trying to figure out the virtual maze. This maze was hard every time they had to start in a different place each time they tried. They also had to picture of a tree and remember where the saw it. There was a 90 minutes of a five-hour break, one half of the college student was told to take a short nap, and the other half was told to stay awake. The students that were awake were told to tell what’s in their thoughts. The other group of people was asked what was there dream before and after the sleep. The scientists wanted to know about NREM ("rapid eye movement"), or non-NREM, what happens during REM sleep. This time of sleeping usually bring weird or bizarre dreams to the sleeper, even though dreams can happen in all two modes of sleep. Four out of 50 people said that there dream was connected to the maze they did before. Some dreams were about the music that was played when they were working on the maze, and others were seeing people in the maze. When the 4 people tried the maze again after the nap they were able to the tree faster than before. One of the scientists thought the dream doesn't help to learn. He said that it's the other way around. All 4 of the people who dreamed about the maze did very poorly for the first time.