"Sleep and Dreams": latest findings in discussion on the 9th Symposium Behind and Beyond the Brain

"Sleep and Dreams": latest findings in discussion on the 9th Symposium Behind and Beyond the Brain

• Why do we need to sleep?
• What’s the meaning of dreams?
• Does sleep affects our memory?
• Can we control our dreams?
• What happens in the human body while we sleep?

These are some of the questions to be answered during the 9th Symposium of the Bial Foundation, dedicated to the analysis and discussion of "Sleep and Dreams". The Symposium will be between March 28 - 31 in Oporto. Many other questions will surely arise, pointing out new paths in scientific research in neuroscience, worldwide, on these topics.

The symposium is dedicated to three main themes: on the 29th March, the 1st session addresses the neurobiology of the processes of sleep and cognition. On the 30th March, the focus will be on anomalous aspects underlying dreams. Finally, at the 3rd session of the symposium, on the 31st March, the theme of "Sleep and Dreams" will be discussed in a multidisciplinary way from the social point of view.

On the Symposium the results of several research projects of BIAL Foundation fellows will be presented and will be available at the posters exhibition. On March 30, at 21h30, on an Evening Encounter, the facets of Sleep and Dreams that were not directly explored during the sessions will be lively and freely debated among all participants.

The Symposium "Behind and Beyond the Brain" is an initiative of the BIAL Foundation that began in 1996. This ninth edition of the Symposium "Behind and Beyond the Brain" brings to Portugal the leading experts in the field of sleep and dreams, responsible for the most relevant and current research in this area.


Dreaming one’s Life

Professor Allan Hobson, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA, will open the meeting with a session in which he will present the results of his investigations and the Theory of Protoconsciousness. For this remarkable researcher, sleep is a kind of antechamber of consciousness that allows us to create a virtual reality and prepare us to be more vigilant during the day. According to his theory, the dream allows the training and preparation for the reality while we are awake.

Stephen LaBerge, a prominent researcher at Stanford University, USA, will explore the theory of Lucid Dreaming. LaBerge argues that it is possible that people can be recognizant of dreaming while remaining asleep, fully engaged in dream worlds that can seem as vivid and "real" as one’s waking realities. In lucid dreams, one can reason rationally, remember one's condition in waking life, and act deliberately within the dream.

LaBerge has a methodology to teach people to have lucid dreams, very similar to real life experiences that influence the physical and physiological experiments. His studies might be a further step in cultural evolution, being "awake within our dreams", a means to explore the way our brains create our lived realities, bringing greater perspective on what it truly means to be Awake.


10% of world population suffers from insomnia

Insomnia is the focus of the lecture of Eus van Someren, Director of the Department of Sleep and Cognition of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. Recent data show that chronic insomnia affects about 10% of the population, resulting from conditions such as diseases, emotional conditions and stress among other related factors that interfere with sleep quality.. It is estimated that up to 3% of the world’s population presents a permanent and severe insomnia. While insomnia has serious consequences, e.g. being the major risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders, our understanding of its brain mechanisms is very limited. Van Someren's lecture provides examples that illustrate the value of application of the arsenal of brain imaging tools that have been developed in human cognitive neuroscience, to tackle the underlying mechanisms of insomnia.


Sleep and Dreams, Memory and Emotion

Robert Stickgold, Psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, will approach the critical role of sleep in the offline processing of recently formed memories. For simple procedural skills – how to ride a bicycle or distinguish different coins in one’s pocket – a night of sleep or an afternoon nap leads to an absolute and dramatic improvement in performance. Sleep also stabilizes verbal memories and can lead to the selective retention of emotional memories. Through such qualitative processing of memory, sleep attaches meaning to the events of our lives.

How sleep and emotion interact in the process of memory consolidation and thus influence waking decision making is the theme of the lecture of Sophie Schwartz, University of Geneva. To this researcher emotions in dreams (positive or negative) reflect the privileged processing of emotionally-relevant information during sleep.

Sleep and emotion fulfil vital functions by fostering adapted responses to past and future psychological (or physical) challenges. This emerging view is promising for fundamental and clinical research, as well as for concrete applications towards promoting public health, particularly because sleep curtailment is ubiquitous in today’s fast-paced society.

In the Symposium Behind and Beyond the Brain, the psychological theories about dreams interpretation will also be revisited. Caroline Watt, Professor of Parapsychology at Edinburgh University, Scotland, argues that the sense that one has had a dream about a future event is one of the most common paranormal experiences. However, studies are not enough for a conclusion, as precognitive dreams are either validated or not. The presentation of Caroline Watt will review the principal psychological mechanisms that have been proposed to explain why people may mistakenly conclude that they have had a precognitive dream.


Cardiovascular diseases as consequence of sleep disorders

The connection between sleep, dreams and social life will be explored by Teresa Paiva, a pioneer researcher in the study of sleep in Portugal.

Sleep disorders are among the expensive brain disorders in Europe; in 2010, 35.4 billion€ were spent, occupying the 9th top position in a rank 19 disorder groups. Nowadays the societal influences have an important impact upon sleep curtailment, scheduling and work organization with dramatic consequences upon physical and mental health and upon life expectancy. It is widely recognized that sleeping too less or too much is associated with an increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disorders, obesity, type II diabetes, insomnia, depression, cancer and reduced life expectancy. Sleep and fatigue are responsible for many traffic and catastrophic accidents.

The increasing levels of daytime sleepiness among children and young adults and the excessive adult consumption of sleep promoting medications are of great concern. According to this researcher, society and health care services are forced to pay attention to the present figures.