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Researchers from the University of California claim that the movement of the eye as you sleep may mirror where you are gazing in a dream. For a very long time, researchers from all over the world have been fascinated by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is a stage of sleep during which your eyes move behind your eyelids. Although studies have attempted to demonstrate a link between eye movement during sleeping and vivid dreams, REM sleep is also thought to be a time when people have vivid dreams.
By observing subjects' eye movements as they slept and waking them up to inquire what they were dreaming of, previous research have sought to explore the relationship between the two factors.
The research' inconsistent findings, however, may be attributable to the self-reported dreams' erroneous reporting as well as the technical inability to correlate a certain eye movement with a specific moment in the dream.
Researchers from the University of California attempted to evaluate dreams using the electrical activity of a sleeping brain in their recent study. The scientists studied mice, which are known to undergo REM sleep, rather than humans. The study was released in the Science magazine.
The thalamus, a sort of internal compass that controls how a mouse points its head, has been used by researchers to track the activity of nerve cells. When the mice were awake, the research team used tiny, implanted probes to record their neural activity. They also recorded every dart and eyeblink with a number of cameras.
The sensors continued to function while the mice slept, and saccades—rapid eye movements made between fixation points set during the waking phase—were utilised to build a connection between the movement of the eye during REM and the direction that the mice's minds were intended to travel.
The results demonstrated that, just like mice's gaze shift while they are awake, eye movement direction in sleeping mice precisely followed changes in head direction. This means that eye movements during REM sleep may reveal gaze alterations in the dream world's virtual reality, giving a window into the dreamer's internal thought processes.
The study was able to prove that during REM sleep, a region of the brain that regulates head orientation coordinates with a region that regulates eye movements.
The discovery, according to researchers, may represent a major advance in our knowledge of how the brain works when we sleep.
