Sarah Baldeo, neuroscientist and TED speaker, explains how dreaming occurs in the human brain on CTV Morning Live Edmonton.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: Well, it’s something almost everyone does every night, but we rarely remember what happened or understand what’s going on in our minds. It’s dreaming. Sarah, what exactly happens in our brains when we dream?

Sarah Baldéo: What’s interesting is that many people think they are falling asleep and immediately start dreaming. That’s not what’s happening. Dreams only occur during one sleep cycle, namely the rapid eye movement cycle or REM cycle symptoms. You have to go through three stages of sleep before you even get to REM sleep, and then your brain activity starts to change. Five key areas of your brain are active during this time. The first is your brainstem, which paralyzes your muscles, which is important when you’re sleeping because you don’t want to sleepwalk. The second is your amygdala, which is why dreams are so emotional. The third is basically activating your memories, your short and long term memories, this is the part of your brain called the hippocampus. The fourth reason is why we have these lucid dreams that seem so real, they activate your vision center or your occipital lobe, which is weird because it’s the back of your brain. Eventually, your prefrontal cortex, which sits right at the front of your brain, becomes significantly less active when you dream, and that’s why sometimes dreams don’t make sense.

Kent: Very interesting, that everything is so active. Why do we dream of all this?

Sarah: The purpose of the dream is for you to make sense of your waking life and process your emotions. Physiologically, your brain eliminates these chemicals called neurotoxins that build up throughout the day. Like I said, you can’t dream without hitting the REM cycle. This is why it is not only the quantity of sleep that is important, but also the quality of sleep. So you can start to purge these neurotoxins while you’re dreaming and that’s why dreaming is so important.

Kent: Do our dreams mean anything?

Sarah: I get this question a lot. Everyone wants to believe that he is clairvoyant and medium. From a scientific perspective, dreams only mean looking for patterns in your waking life. That’s what your brain does: it processes data, it looks for patterns. If you have a dream and it comes true in real life, try looking at the statistics of how many times you had a dream and nothing happened (or) something happened and you didn’t you didn’t have a dream. You’re simply experiencing what’s called confirmation bias, which makes you believe that your dreams predict the future. They just mean you’re looking for patterns.

Kent: OK, that’s interesting to know. There is now new technology to record dreams for playback. Is this a good or bad thing?

Sarah: I think it’s a fascinating thing. In Kyoto, Japan, researchers have found a way to use artificial intelligence algorithms and working magnetic resonance imaging machines. Basically, they take pictures of your brain, they look for patterns in neural activity, and then it’s played back to you, much like a movie. I think potentially the technology is just too nascent to say, “How does this impact us?” (and) “What happens when we look at our dreams?” » This also does not take into account that there are different sleep patterns and abnormalities in sleep patterns. Entertainment value? It’s great. Scientific value? There is still a long way to go before we can believe this is accurate.