For the last few decades, Dr. Robert “Bob” Stickgold has led the way in reshaping our understanding of sleep through his influential studies and theoretical frameworks. His work has established sleep as an active component of memory consolidation, in which reactivation and dreaming foster the selective stabilization, abstraction, and integration of waking experiences, optimizing our cognitive...
The function and meaning of dreams continue to fascinate and allude humankind. Despite the near universal intrigue, the pendulum of public and scientific opinion on dream research seems to have regularly oscillated over the past 150 years between fringe parapsychology and mainstream scholarly pursuit. One contributing factor is that dream research has always and continues to primarily rely on...
Information processing during sleep is active, ongoing and accessible to engineering. Protocols such as targeted memory reactivation use sensory stimuli during sleep to reactivate memories and demonstrate subsequent, specific enhancement of their consolidation. These protocols rely on physiological, as opposed to phenomenological, evidence of their reactivation. While dream content can predict...