Listening to an audiobook before bed affects a person鈥檚 brain activity after they nod off and the content of their dreams. Better understanding this could lead to therapies that help to treat certain mental health conditions by targeting memory processing during sleep.
, or reactivates, patterns of electrical activity that are related to learning, to transfer important new information to long-term memory storage. It has been suggested that dreams may reflect this reactivation, but exactly how is unclear.
To investigate, at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and her colleagues asked 20 people to listen to different audiobooks just before they went to sleep. These included The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie and Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.
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Among the participants who remembered their dreams, the researchers could identify which audiobook each had heard from their descriptions of the dreams.
While the participants slept, the researchers also used an EEG cap that detects electrical activity to record their brain waves. This showed that the wave patterns during the rapid eye movement phase of sleep, when dreams occur, were more similar between those who had heard the same audiobook than those who had heard different ones, suggesting that the listening experience shaped the brain activity.
Further analysis of the patterns revealed that high-frequency beta waves 鈥� between 18 and 30 hertz 鈥� were most strongly associated with the participants recalling the audiobook-related content of their dreams.
The findings suggest that daily life experiences can shape dream content via memory reactivation, according to the researchers. But while dreaming may serve a distinct purpose in memory formation, it could also be a by-product of memory processing.
鈥淒aytime experiences are rarely replayed as experienced, but are almost always modified or surface in different contexts,鈥� says Kumral. 鈥淭his fits with the idea that reactivation and dreaming are related to consolidation of memory, in the sense that new experiences are integrated with existing knowledge.鈥�
The study lays the groundwork for future research that could have medical applications, she says. 鈥淚ndividuals with certain psychological or psychiatric conditions might benefit from tailored strategies that enhance memory processing or treat disorders of dreaming during sleep, potentially contributing to improved cognitive and emotional well-being,鈥� says Kumral.
bioRxiv
