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 Posted by Ross Pomeroy 
 
 
 
 In the Biblical story of Jacob told in Genesis 28, Jacob settled down for the night when trekking through the deserts of Canaan and fell asleep: 
 
 “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.” 
 
 Jacob thought he received a message from God, but most modern cognitive scientists would say that's unlikely. Instead, they would proffer that his mind had manufactured vivid images, emotions, ideas, and sensations. Jacob's apparent theophany was a dream, nothing more. 
 
 In Ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that dreams were direct messages from deities. While the precise mechanism for dreams remains unknown, scientists have narrowed down their origin to somewhere in the brain, not the beyond. 
 
 Sleep is divided into four distinct stages. In the final stage, called rapid-eye movement (REM), the brain lights up with electrical activity, almost as if awake. REM sleep is when most dreaming occurs, and when they are most vivid. During this phase, in our sleeping minds, we are transported. We see, hear, and feel. We experience things we would never experience in real life. We face the otherworldly and the supernatural. 
 
 It is no wonder then that dreams have played a major role in the historical evolution of religions, says Patrick Mcnamara, a neurologist at Boston University, and Kelly Bulkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in a new paper published to Frontiers in Psychology. 
 
 Researchers working in many different parts of the world have found that people in traditional societies treat dreams as the sources of their religious ideas, including their concepts of their gods and other supernatural beings. It is likely that ancestral populations also treated them as such. Dreams were considered proof of the gods and a spirit realm since dreams were involuntary and emotionally vivid experiences that involved the dreamer’s soul encountering other beings including long deceased relatives and so on. 
 
 Why do people occasionally prescribe sacred status to figures in our dreams? One theory from evolutionary psychology holds that humans are inclined to presume intelligence or agency in unlikely places, as doing so might help recognize patterns that might have been missed, thus granting a better chance of survival. As the intuitive argument goes, it's better to assume the sound of a snapping twig was caused by a bear or a tiger, rather than just a falling branch. And so in dreams, we might be more likely to assume that advice or warning from a talking tree or a burning bush comes from a higher being who's looking out for us -- it's not merely meaningless drivel. 
 
 Dreams offer, perhaps, the perfect setting to "converse" with a deity, Bulkeley and Mcnamara say, for three major reasons. First, dreams bring forth "mental stimulations of alternate realities." Second, they are replete with theory of mind attributions, in which we attribute mental states to other beings or entities. And third, they allow us to give value or significance to our experiences. "The neurobiology of... sleep states is now understood to involve forebrain mesocortical dopaminergic systems that directly compute value and dis-value," Bulkeley and Mcnamara write. 
 
 Considering these factors, Bulkeley and Mcnamara reach an intriguing conclusion. 
 
 "All humans are endowed with brains innately primed to daily generate god concepts in dreaming." 
 
 Source: Mcnamara P and Bulkeley K (2015). Dreams as a source of supernatural agent concepts. Front. Psychol. 6:283. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283 
 
 (Image: Shutterstock) ||||| Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Time for a change of scene? 
 
 For the first time, scientists have recorded from individual brain cells during the dreaming phase of sleep. 
 
 After each rapid eye movement (REM) they recorded bursts of activity that match what happens when we are awake and we see - or imagine - a new image. 
 
 They suggest that these well-known flickering movements accompany a "change of scene" in our dreams. 
 
 The recordings were made from patients with electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor seizures. 
 
 "It's a unique opportunity to look at what's happening inside the human brain," Dr Yuval Nir, from Tel Aviv University in Israel, told the BBC. "We're very thankful to the epilepsy patients who volunteered to take part." 
 
 Dr Nir worked with colleagues from France and the US on the study, which is published in the journal Nature Communications. 
 
 Next slide please 
 
 Over the course of four years they worked with 19 different patients, recording from electrodes in several different brain areas but largely within the medial temporal lobe. 
 
 This is not a part of the brain directly involved in vision, Dr Nir said. 
 
 "The activity of these neurons doesn't reflect image processing. It's more about signalling to the brain about a certain concept. 
 
 "You can close your eyes and imagine Queen Elizabeth, and these neurons will fire. This activity implies a refresh of the mental imagery and the associations." 
 
 When the patients were awake and shown a picture, especially one associated with a memory, the researchers saw a particular pattern of activity. 
 
 "About a 0.3 seconds after the picture appears, these neurons burst - they become vigorously active," Dr Nir explained. "This also happens when people just close their eyes and imagine these pictures, or these concepts." 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption This is the first study to record from individual brain cells during REM sleep 
 
 Intriguingly, he and his colleagues spotted a "very, very similar pattern" during sleep. In particular, these bursts arrived just after eye movements during REM sleep. 
 
 This is the phase of sleep in which we dream, and it is characterised by these occasional, very quick eye movements. 
 
 It has long been thought that these movements might reflect the visual component of dreams, but there has been no clear evidence for this - until now, Dr Nir said. 
 
 "We are intimately familiar with the activity of these neurons. We know they are active every time you look at an image, or when you imagine that image. And now we see them active in a similar way when you move your eyes in REM sleep, so it becomes very probable that the eye movements represent some type of reset, or 'moving onto the next dream frame'. 
 
 "It's almost like when I was growing up and we had slide projectors. You move to the next dream slide, if you like." 
 
 Switching not scanning 
 
 This could help to explain why unborn babies and blind people also move their eyes during REM sleep, he added. 
 
 "Even people who are congenitally blind... can still dream about their aunt coming to visit from Florida: her voice, the emotions and all the associations that go with that. 
 
 "And when the dream changes from meeting this aunt to, say, taking your dog for a stroll in the park, then the brain activity changes and this happens in sync with eye movements." 
 
 Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Our eyes flicker in spurts during the dreaming phase of sleep 
 
 Other sleep researchers welcomed the findings. Prof Jim Horne, who established the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, said the study fits with our improving understanding of REM sleep. 
 
 He also emphasised that flickering of a dreamer's eyes, which only happens in brief spurts, does not mean they are surveying a scene. 
 
 "The eye movements are not actually scanning your dream - they're reorienting your visual thoughts," Prof Horne told BBC News. 
 
 "This study endorses other findings that REM sleep has many similarities to wakefulness. 
 
 "I see REM sleep as rather like the screensaver on your computer; all you need is the touch of a button and your computer leaps to life. It's very close to wakefulness. Non-REM sleep is more like when you switch your computer off, and waking up requires a process of rebooting." 
 
 Prof William Wisden, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, was also convinced by the similarity of brain activity between awake and REM states - but he said there are bigger questions still to answer. 
 
 "The most fascinating question of all is why do we have to have REM sleep? Why does our brain have all this circuitry to do that? 
 
 "This paper doesn't answer that, but it does emphasise how similar being awake and in REM sleep are, for particular circuits in the brain." 
 
 Follow Jonathan on Twitter ||||| Scientists discover that use of electric currents can influence sleepers' brains, potentially allowing them to control their dreams 
 
 Scientists have discovered that it is possible to induce lucid dreaming in sleepers by applying mild electrical currents to their scalps, a study says. 
 
 Lucid dreaming is when a sleeper recognises they are dreaming and may even be able to manipulate the dream's plot and control their behaviour. 
 
 "The key finding is that you can, surprisingly, by scalp stimulation, influence the brain. And you can influence the brain in such a way that a sleeper, a dreamer, becomes aware that he is dreaming," said Professor J Allan Hobson, from Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the paper published in Nature Neuroscience. 
 
 Previous research, led by Dr Ursula Voss of Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Germany, suggests lucid dreaming is a unique state that displays aspects of both REM-sleep – the stage of sleep in which most of our dreams occur – and waking. By examining the sleepers' brainwaves over a range of frequencies, scientists have found that lucid dreamers demonstrate a shift towards a more "awake-like" state in the frontal and temporal parts of the brain, with the peak in increased activity occurring around 40Hz. 
 
 "Lucid dreaming is a very good tool to observe what happens in the brain and what is causally necessary for secondary consciousness," Voss said. 
 
 Now Voss and her team have reported that it is possible to induce lucid dreaming by delivering electrical stimulation, in the form of an alternating current to a sleeper's scalp at this frequency. 
 
 The study involved 27 volunteers, none of whom had experienced lucid dreaming before. The researchers waited until the volunteers were experiencing uninterrupted REM sleep before applying electrical stimulation to the frontal and temporal positions of the volunteers' scalps. 
 
 The applied stimulation had a variety of frequencies between two and 100Hz, but neither the experimenter nor the volunteer was informed which frequency was used, or whether a current was applied. Five to 10 seconds later the volunteers were roused from their sleep and asked to report on their dreams. Brain activity was monitored continuously throughout the experiment. 
 
 The results showed that stimulation at 40Hz resulted in an increase in brain activity of around the same frequency in the frontal and temporal areas. A similar, but smaller effect was observed at 25Hz. They also found that such stimulation often, but not always, induced an increased level of lucidity in the dreams of sleepers. At higher or lower frequencies, or when no current was applied, no change in brain activity was observed. 
 
 Hobson said the study could have implications in psychiatric research. "As a model for mental illness, understanding lucid dreaming is absolutely crucial. "I would be cautious about interpreting the results as of direct relevance to the treatment of medical illnesses, but [it's] certainly a step in the direction of understanding how the brain manages to hallucinate and be deluded." 
 
 The authors suggest triggering lucid dreaming in sleepers might enable them to control nightmares, for example in those suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder.
– Religions throughout the world—and throughout history—have put dreams at the center of their belief systems, and researchers say there's a good reason for that. We do much of our intense dreaming during REM sleep, when the highly active brain acts almost like it's awake, writes Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science. All that activity can lead to dreamed situations that feel very real—in some cases, even religious. In a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, a neurologist and theological scholar argue that dreams are well-suited to create experiences in which we believe we've spoken to a deity of some kind. That is in part due to the feeling of an alternative reality we get in dreams, the researchers say. What's more, in dreams, we often ascribe emotions and thoughts to those we believe we're encountering. We give them an "exaggerated degree of agency" because our dreaming brains have trouble understanding our thoughts as our own, the researchers write. The researchers also note that unclear boundaries between REM sleep and wakefulness can be linked to schizophrenia—but at Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz notes that the feeling of "hearing voices" may not necessarily mean a person is dealing with mental illness. A recent survey found that 15% of respondents who say they've heard voices have no diagnosis of disorder, and the "hearing" involved isn't necessarily auditory; the voices may not feel as though they're external at all, researchers say. (Researchers last year described schizophrenia as not one, but eight different illnesses.)