*Boo* Bizarre Ways Dreams and Reality Intersect Do amnesiacs dream? If your dreams help with your memory, what happens when you have amnesia? The answer: You have absolutely no clue what you’re dreaming about, but you damn well dream it anyway. There are different types of memory; amnesiacs typically can’t store new “declarative” or “episodic” memories—specific facts or time references (such as when or where you learned a fact). But when amnesiacs were instructed to play the game Tetris, they dreamed about it anyway, despite having no memory of the game by the time they went to sleep. As they were drifting to sleep, the amnesiac study participants were woken up and questioned about what they saw. Three out of the five described seeing “falling, rotating blocks,” even though they had no context for the memory. Since a large part of dreaming is storing recent memories, amnesiacs must be assaulted with those types of bizarre images on a regular basis. Even with our most bizarre dreams we can usually pick out plenty of familiar objects—for amnesiacs the imagery seems to come from nowhere.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 12:51:23 +0000
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