Rats dream

Earlier this week we discussed some exciting aspects of sleep research, although one of them unfortunately was not, as one might hope, how to find time to sleep more. But there are many useful things we can learn from sleep research, mainly due to the fact that a lot of this research is conducted with rats, whose sleep habits and experiences correspond exactly with that of humans.

Rats seem to be the research subject of choice for many things, including sleep. For starters, rats do not get so testy upon being repeatedly wakened from a sound sleep, as people tend to do. Also, since rats do not, generally, have the gift of speech -- although I'm sure scientists somewhere are working on that -- researchers can make up whatever they like about the rats' sleeping experiences.

Take, for instance, a finding that the brain patterns of rats while they were sleeping were almost identical to the patterns they showed while running a maze earlier in the day. The researchers concluded that the rats were dreaming about the maze. They could even tell from the brain patterns what part of the maze the rats were dreaming about. So they say.

But how do we know for sure that the rats were dreaming about the maze? Maybe they just don't have all that much subject matter to dream about. Or all that many different brain patterns. To confirm the results from these brain studies, we need some sort of other measure, something extremely objective, like a questionnaire conducted upon waking. It might include questions such as the following:

Did you sleep well?
a) Yes, thank you for asking. And you?
b) No, some idiot kept waking me up and probing my head with sharp metal objects.

What did you dream about? (choose one)
a) attractive rat of the opposite sex
b) I was running frantically through a complex series of twists, turns, and dead ends, but I never did find the restroom.
c) how satisfying it might be to strangle these researchers' necks

This would shed a lot more light on sleep.

My own personal experience with dreams, and Joe's as well, seems to be that they have little relation to real life. If they did, I would dream more about food, and staying awake at work, and not so much about boa constrictors chasing me through abandoned buildings. And Joe -- well, some of you may remember the wisdom imparted through one of his dreams, which was that "you gotta plan it so the big moose doesn't poop on your head."

Let the researchers work on that one.