Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Cloé Blanchette-Carrière, Sarah-Hélène Julien, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
20 citations
The neurophysiological basis of self-awareness during sleep (lucid dreaming) is still poorly understood. Previous work suggested that transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) during sleep could increase dream self-awareness, but methodological flaws in those studies motivated a new investigation. In the current study, both tACS and a sham procedure were associated with signal-verified and self-rated lucid dreams, indicating that situational factors, rather than the stimulation itself, may be critical for inducing self-awareness during sleep.
Front Psychol
January 23, 2020
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière et al.
9 citations
Vipassana meditation practitioners show different patterns of how sleep consolidates procedural memories compared to non-meditators. The study compared overnight memory retention in meditators and controls, finding that meditators exhibited distinct consolidation processes, suggesting that long-term meditation practice alters sleep-dependent memory processing.
Frontiers in Neuroscience
March 18, 2021
Louis-Philippe Marquis, Sarah-Hélène Julien, Véronique Daneault et al.
6 citations
Frequent nightmares are linked to altered brain activity in regions beyond the limbic-prefrontal circuit, including frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, and subcortical areas. A resting-state fMRI study compared 18 frequent nightmare recallers aged 18–35 with matched controls. Nightmare recallers showed greater regional homogeneity in the left anterior cingulate cortex and right inferior parietal lobule. Positive correlation emerged between retrospective nightmare frequency and hippocampal regional homogeneity. Results suggest multiple brain regions contribute to nightmare formation, partially supporting a neurocognitive model involving medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, hippocampus, and amygdala.
Journal of Sleep Research
August 1, 2015
Gaëlle Dumel, Michelle Carr, Louis-Philippe Marquis et al.
People who habitually recall few dreams performed worse on a visuomotor task (mirror tracing) before sleep but showed greater overnight improvement than those who recall many dreams. The improvement in low recallers was linked to Stage 2 sleep rather than rapid eye movement sleep. The findings suggest that dreaming relates to visuomotor processes and that different levels of visuomotor skill engage distinct sleep-related consolidation mechanisms.
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière et al.
Meditation experience alters how sleep supports memory consolidation. In a study of Vipassana meditation practitioners and meditation-naïve controls who napped in a laboratory, both groups improved similarly on a balance task after sleep, but the brain activity underlying that improvement differed. In meditators, task learning was linked to slow occipital sleep spindles and negatively linked to fast spindles, whereas in controls improvement was associated with increased REM sleep. Meditators also had fewer sleep spindles overall, especially in occipital regions. The findings suggest that long-term meditation practice may reorganize sleep-dependent memory processes and compensate for some memory functions of sleep.
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Arnaud Samson-Richer et al.
Meditators have longer dreams with friendlier, more compassionate interactions and slightly more references to the body, but their dreams are no more lucid than those of non-meditators. Meditators did not incorporate a procedural learning task or the laboratory into their dreams more often than controls. Among control participants, incorporating the task or laboratory into REM/N2 dreams was linked to improved task performance, while incorporations at sleep onset were tied to slightly worse performance. No relationship between dream content and procedural task performance was found for meditators.