几米最新作品2017:做梦的意义

做梦的意义

By Heather Catchpole

作者：希瑟·凯奇坡

Published 16 August 2010

发表于2010年8月16日

Sleep plays an active part in turning around the experiences we have in the day. 

    睡觉能积极地转化我们白天的体验。

We may not always remember them, but dreams may play a very important role in laying down memories and learning new tasks.

   可能我们不能全部记住梦，但是梦有助于找出记忆，学习新的工作。

Dreams can be terrifying, erotic, bizarre or even banal. But what are dreams to the human mind? Are they, as Sigmund Freud suggested, messages from our unconscious mind? Are we opening our mind to new ideas, or simply trying to remember what we've learned that day?

    梦可能是可怕的、性欲的、怪诞的或者甚至是平凡的。但是梦对人类大脑意味着什么呢？是像西格蒙德·弗洛伊德说的潜意识的信息吗？我们做梦是打开心灵新思路呢，还是仅仅记住当天我们所知道的东西？

We've come a long way since Freud's early theories of dream interpretation. Our dreams might be startling, but often we remember very little — sometimes nothing — of the two or more hours we dream each night.

    直到弗洛伊德的梦的解释的早期理论，我们探究梦走了漫长的一段路。我们的梦也许是惊人的，但是常常我们记住的只是少少的一部分——有时什么也没记住——每个晚上我们可能两个小时或更多的时间在做梦。

But while we may not recall our nocturnal visions, scientists increasingly believe our dreams play an important role in memory and learning. And what we remember or learn varies throughout the sleep cycle.

    但是尽管我们回想不起夜间梦景，科学家日益相信我们的梦对我们的记忆和学习起到重要作用。我们的所记所学贯穿整个睡眠周期变化着。

Sleep patterns

    睡眠类型

We dream during different sleep stages throughout the night. Vivid, emotional and often very weird dreams are typical of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which makes up about 20 per cent of our sleep. In between cycles of REM sleep, we have non-REM sleep, which includes deep or 'slow-wave' sleep. Dreams during deep sleep are often 'thought-like' and are more typically anchored in reality.

    一整夜，我们在不同睡眠阶段都做梦。生动逼真的、情绪的以及常常不可思议的梦是快速眼动睡眠阶段的特点，快速眼动睡眠占据了我们睡眠的20%时间。在快速眼动睡眠周期之间，我们还有非快速眼动睡眠，包括深度睡眠和慢波期睡眠。深度睡眠时的梦常常类似于思考，更典型地紧紧贴合现实。

"REM dreams tend to be longer, more visually intense and more emotional," says Associate Professor Robert Stickgold, a lead memory and dream researcher at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. 

    “快速眼动周期的梦常常长一点，更视觉化一些，也更多些情绪化，”副教授罗伯特·斯蒂克哥德说，他是波士顿哈佛医学院的一位重要的记忆与梦研究员。

Slow-wave dreams tend to be harder to get people to recall in sleep experiments, and are more related to episodic memories; our record of personal experience, he says.

    慢波期的梦常常很难让人回忆起睡眠中的实验，更多的和情景记忆有关，是个人体验的记录，他说。

During REM sleep, our brain's electrical activity mirrors its activity when we're awake. The brain stem is active, as is most of the forebrain, including the neocortex — our 'centre' of higher mental processing; the thalamus, which relays sensory inputs; and the amygdala and hippocampus, sections of the brain that deal with emotions as well as memory storage and recall。

    在快速眼动睡眠期，我们大脑的脑电活动反映了我们醒着时大脑的活动。脑干是活跃的，如同前脑的大部分一样，包括新（大脑）皮质——我们的高心智处理中心；丘脑，传递了感觉输入；杏仁核和海马，大脑中处理情绪和记忆存储和回忆的区域。

"In REM sleep, brain activity is fairly high, particularly in the cortex, similar to when we are lightly asleep or even awake," says Dr Keith Wong, a sleep physician and researcher from the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research at the University of Sydney. 

    “在快速眼动睡眠期，大脑活动相当高，尤其在脑皮层，类似于我们浅睡甚至是醒着的时候，”王凯斯博士说，他是悉尼大学医学研究所的一位睡眠医师和研究员。

In the deeper stages of non-REM sleep brain activity is slower. "There is an oscillation between the thalamus and the cortex [during slow wave sleep], a resonance that occurs at a low frequency that blocks off impulses from the rest of the body — the brain becomes isolated," he says. 

    在非快速眼动睡眠期的更深层阶段，脑活动较慢一点。“丘脑和脑皮层之间有一种振动（深层睡眠时的慢波期），在低频率下产生的共鸣阻挡了身体其余部分的脉冲——大脑就变孤立了，”他说。

How much sleep do you get? Find out about your sleep habits and contribute to what could be the biggest scientific sleep survey ever!

    你睡眠有多久？找出你的睡眠习惯，为可能是迄今为止最大的科学睡眠调查做点贡献！

The Big Sleep Survey 2010 is a real citizen science research project. Australian sleep scientists want to find out how much sleep we're getting, whether mobiles and laptops in the bedroom are affecting our sleep, and how many of us experience parasomnias, such as sleep walking.

    2010沉睡调查是一项真实的市民科学调查项目。澳大利亚睡眠科学家想要查明我们获得了多少睡眠，卧室的移动通讯和电脑产品是否影响了我们的睡眠，以及我们中有多少人经历过异睡症，比如梦游。

Dreaming to forget or remember?

    做梦是忘记还是记忆？

The connection between dreams and their role in memory go back a long way.

    梦以及其作用之间的联系要回溯到很久以前。

Early theories suggested dreams were just a kind of mind sieve that captures our important memories.

    早期的理论表明，梦只是一种抓住重要记忆的意识筛子。

"Dreams were never designed to be remembered, but they are keys to who we are," the late neuroscientist Associate Professor Jonathan Winson wrote in 1985 in Brain and Psyche: The biology of the unconscious. Winson believed that when we dream the hippocampus 'teaches' the neocortex what it learnt that day — effectively reinforcing memory.

    “梦从来都不在于被记住，但是它们是知道我们是谁的关键，”近期的神经系统科学家副教授乔纳森·文森在1985年的《大脑与心灵：潜意识生物学》中写道。文森认为，当我们梦到海马“教”脑皮层当天它所获悉的东西时——实际上是在加强记忆。

Two years' earlier, neuroscientists and molecular biologists Francis Crick (the 'father' of DNA) and Graeme Mitchison proposed that dreams eliminate 'spurious memories' created in the brain by overlaps in the process of storing memories. 

    更早的两年，神经系统科学家和分子生物学家们弗朗西斯·克里克（DNA之父）和格雷姆·米其森 提出，梦排除大脑中存储记忆过程中重叠的伪造记忆。

"We dream in order to forget"," they said. That is, dreams help us to remember by wiping clean the brain's unwanted 'white noise'. 

    “我们做梦是为了忘记，”他们说道。也就是说，梦帮助我们拭净大脑中不需要的‘白噪音’来记忆。

But more recently scientists such as Stickgold suggest dreams play a more active role.

    但是最近的科学家比如斯蒂克哥德，提出，梦有更积极的作用。

There's convincing evidence that dreaming helps us learn and that, when we dream, the brain is making connections which help us to integrate and abstract general 'rules' from information in our memory, says Stickgold. 

    这有令人信服的证据：梦帮助我们学习，我们做梦的时候，大脑在做帮助我们从记忆中信息整合和提取一般法则的联系，斯蒂克哥德说。

In research published in Current Biology earlier this year Stickgold and colleagues at the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard show dreaming about a specific task predicts improved performance on that task.

    这年早些时候发布在《当代生物学》上的研究里，斯蒂克哥德和其在哈佛睡眠与认知中心的同事说明，梦见一项特殊的任务预示着改善那项任务的执行效果。

They trained 99 volunteers to complete a virtual maze as quickly as possible. Half of the volunteers then had an afternoon nap, while the rest stayed awake. After five hours the volunteers had another go at the maze; this time, those who napped showed signs of improvement. 

    他们训练了99个志愿者尽快地完成一个虚拟的迷宫。半数志愿者当时有午睡，其余的是醒着的。五个小时后，志愿者再走迷宫，这一次，午睡了的志愿者显示出提高的迹象。

But four people, who initially performed poorly and who had had maze-like dreams during non-REM sleep, (such as hearing the maze's soundtrack or meeting people along checkpoints in the maze), showed a ten-fold improvement over those who didn't dream about the maze. The research indicates that dreams seem to reflect the brain's continued learning processes playing out while we sleep, Stickgold suggests.

    但是最初表现糟糕以及在非快速眼动睡眠期做了类似迷宫的梦的四个人，（比如听到了迷宫声道或者碰见了沿着迷宫里检验点的人），表示出比那些没有梦见过迷宫的人十倍的提高。斯蒂克哥德提出，研究表明，当我们睡的时候，梦似乎反映出大脑的持续学习过程在继续，并要到结束。

"One of the goals of this research is to figure out why experiences are incorporated into dreams, to tell us what the brain's is trying to do when it's making this dream," he says.

    “这个研究的一个目标就是找出为什么经历会合并到梦里去，告诉我们大脑在造这个梦时，大脑想做的，”他说道。

"What we think is happening is the brain is replaying these neural patterns that contain the information on what the game is about and that is leading to enhanced performance." 

    “我们认为正在发生的东西是大脑在重演这些神经模式，包括游戏是什么的信息，这导致了执行效果的提高。”

A previous study by Stickgold, published in Science, exposed amnesiacs and non-memory-impaired volunteers to hours of the addictive game Tetris and reinforced the idea that the brain uses dreams to learn, whether we are aware of it or not. Both amnesiacs and other volunteers showed improved performance on the game after replaying it in their minds as they dropped off to sleep — even though the amnesiacs had no memory of playing the game.

    斯蒂克哥德此前的一项研究，发表在《科学》上，这项研究是让健忘症患者和无记忆受损志愿者数小时沉溺在能上瘾的俄罗斯方块游戏里，研究强化了“不管我们是否醒着，大脑利用梦来学习”的观点。健忘症患者和其他的志愿者都表现出，他们睡着了时脑中重演游戏，他们的游戏能力有所提高——尽管健忘症患者没有玩了游戏的记忆。

Stickgold believes what's going on is that the brain keeps track of unfinished cognitive processes, for example when you can't remember someone's name and it later pops into your head. It may be that while dreaming, these cognitive processes can continue unabated.

    斯蒂克哥德认为，真正起作用的是大脑和未完成地认知过程保持联系，比如，你记不得某人的名字的时候，过一会突然闪现在你脑中。可能是当做梦时，这些认知过程可以持续不减退。

"When you dream the brain is creating possibilities," he says.

    “你做梦时，大脑在创造可能性，”他说。

Making connections

    制造联系

While it's now well established that dreams may be important for memory and learning, the way we learn during different phases of sleep is less clear.

    尽管梦可能对记忆和学习很重要既成事实，在睡眠不同阶段我们学习的方式还不是很明晰。

Some research has shown that dreaming supports the development of connections in the brain where brain cells — neurons — signal each other at junctions called synapses. The growth of synaptic connections takes place during the first few hours of learning and storing of short-term memories.

    一些研究显示，做梦支持了大脑中联系的发展，脑细胞——神经细胞——在突触节点互相发信号通知。在第一个学习和存储短期记忆的几个小时里，突触连接的发展发生了。

We may learn differently during different sleep stages, says German sleep expert Professor Jan Born from the University of Lübeck. 

    我们可能在不同睡眠阶段学习的不一样，吕贝克大学的德国睡眠专家教授简·伯恩说。

"Slow wave sleep (SWS) particularly enhances declarative memories [facts and personal memories] whereas rapid eye movement (REM) sleep preferentially supports procedural and emotional memory aspects [those memories that are harder to verbalise, like riding a bike or understanding the rules of a game]," he recently wrote in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews.

    “慢波期睡眠明确地增强了陈述性记忆（事实和个人记忆），然后快速眼动睡眠倾向性地支持过程和情绪记忆方面（那些记忆很难用词语表达，像骑自行车或者理解游戏的规则），”近期他在期刊《睡眠医学评论》上写到。

Both Born and Stickgold agree that the roles of dreams in the brain may be more complex, and that different sleep stages support the gradual stabilisation of memory in the brain — but they disagree on the role of different sleep stages in this stabilisation process. "So we clearly don't [fully] understand it," says Stickgold.

    伯恩和斯蒂克哥德都认为，梦在大脑中的作用可能更为复杂，不同的睡眠阶段维持了脑中记忆的逐渐平稳——但是他们不同意在这个稳定过程中不同睡眠阶段的作用。“所以我们显然不了解它，”斯蒂克哥德说。

He points out that even those with high dream recall are lucky to remember more than ten minutes of their dreams. "If there's an evolutionary value to dreaming it has to be something that's going on in the background and it doesn't matter if you remember that [dream]," he says.

    他指出，即使那些有着高梦回忆的人幸运的记起了他们梦的十多分钟的内容。“做梦有一种发展的重要性，在后面有某种东西在起作用，如果你会议起了那梦也没有什么，”他说。

While we still have a lot to learn about dreams, Stickgold's research shows that sleep plays an active part in turning around the experiences we have in the day, says Wong. 

    然而对于梦我们还是有很多需要学习的，斯蒂克哥德的研究表明，梦在把我们白天的体验转化中有积极作用，王说道。

Dreams may be just how our consciousness interprets brain activity during sleep, he says.

    他说，梦可能仅仅是我们意识在睡眠中如何解释脑活动。

"It's still a mystery what the function of sleep is and the roles dreams play in sleep. I think we will be speculating about this for years to come."

    “睡眠的功能以及梦在睡眠中的作用仍是一个谜。我想估计还要些年才能解开。”