Scientific Reports
March 13, 2026
Daniel Soares Brandão, Rafael N. B. Scott, Ernesto Soares et al.
Every studied animal species exhibits some form of sleep, a state evolved under the sustained influence of prey and predator behaviors. Dreams have been proposed to have evolved as offline mental simulations able to warn against impending threats from the environment, such as predators. To assess how the ecological roles of prey and predator interact with sleep and dreaming, we used a...
Schizophrenia Research
October 20, 2025
Elena Camon, Stefano Masier, Natália Bezerra Mota et al.
Language disorganization is a hallmark of psychosis which has traditionally been assessed through clinical interviews and standardized scales. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and graph theory provide innovative, objective methodologies to analyze language production in psychosis. In particular, dream reports, as a unique form of narrative, offer a valuable lens through...
European neuropsychopharmacology : the journal of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology
March 1, 2023
Isabel Wießner, Marcelo Falchi, Dimitri Daldegan-Bueno et al.
6 citations
Language has been explored as a window into the mind. Psychedelics, known to affect perception and cognition, seem to change language, but a systematic, time-dependent exploration is lacking. Therefore, we aimed at mapping the psychedelic effects on language over the time course of the acute and sub-acute effects in an explorative manner. For this, 24 healthy volunteers (age [mean±SD, range]:...
Neuroimage
October 17, 2022
Natália Bezerra Mota, Ernesto Soares, Edgar Altszyler et al.
5 citations
The 'day residue' - the presence of waking memories into dreams - is a century-old concept that remains controversial in neuroscience. Even at the psychological level, it remains unclear how waking imagery cedes into dreams. Are visual and affective residues enhanced, modified, or erased at sleep onset? Are they linked, or dissociated? What are the neural correlates of these transformations? To...
Psychopharmacology
June 1, 2022
Isabel Wießner, Marcelo Falchi, Fernanda Palhano-Fontes et al.
22 citations
Stream of thought describes the nature of the mind when it is freely roaming, a mental state that is continuous and highly dynamic as in mind-wandering or free association. Classic serotonergic psychedelics are known to profoundly impact perception, cognition and language, yet their influence on the stream of thought remains largely unexplored. To elucidate the effects of LSD on the stream of...
PLoS One
November 30, 2020
Natália Bezerra Mota, Janaína Weissheimer, Marina Ribeiro et al.
71 citations
The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming...
PLoS One
July 23, 2020
Joshua M. Martin, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Natália Bezerra Mota et al.
41 citations
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement sleep (REM) awakenings are, on average, longer, more vivid, bizarre, emotional and story-like compared to those collected after non-REM. However, a comparison of the word-to-word structural organization of dream reports is lacking, and traditional measures that distinguish REM and non-REM dreaming may be confounded by report length. This problem...
medRxiv
May 21, 2020
Natália Bezerra Mota, Janaína Weissheimer, Marina Ribeiro et al.
7 citations
preprint
Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps to cope with negative emotions and learn from experience. The current global threat related to the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread social isolation. Does dreaming change and/or reflect mental suffering? To address these questions, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports from 67 individuals either before...
Scientific Reports
January 15, 2014
Natália Bezerra Mota, Raimundo Furtado, Pedro Maia et al.
159 citations
Early psychiatry investigated dreams to understand psychopathologies. Contemporary psychiatry, which neglects dreams, has been criticized for lack of objectivity. In search of quantitative insight into the structure of psychotic speech, we investigated speech graph attributes (SGA) in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type I, and non-psychotic controls as they reported waking and...