There are people who have a great facility to remember with an impressive range of details the dream they had the night before. Others, however, state that they remember nothing or practically nothing. Why does this happen?
Although why we dream remains a mystery to science , the fact that these two types of dreamers exist is not. To find out why this difference occurs in sleep memory, a team led by Perrine Ruby from the Center for Neuroscience Research in Lyon (France), has carried out a study, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology , on the brain activity of both.
The results of the study reveal that the temporoparietal junction (information processing center in the brain) is much more active in people who remember dreams (and it is also active during wakefulness).
Thanks to this increase in brain activity, a kind of wakefulness occurs within reverie. The individual is left in a situation of predisposition to auditory sleep stimuli, which can cause small awakenings during the night and thus favor the encoding of these fantasies in memory , because “the sleeping brain is not capable of memorizing new information; you have to wake up to be able to do that, ”says researcher Perrine Ruby.
