"Depriving rats of paradoxical sleep, a period when dreams are more vivid and frequent, alters the learning of numerous tasks," maintains Université de Montréal professor Roger Godbout, a researcher at the Centre d'étude du sommeil et des rhythmes biologiques, the sleep clinic of Montréal's Sacré-Coeur Hospital. In Dr. Godbout's opinion, dreams optimize our abilities to learn and our psychological balance.

Numerous research experiments on what Dr. Godbout terms the "dream-sleep-memory" complex seem to confirm this hypothesis. Assimilation of knowledge is optimal when followed by a period of rest. To Dr. Godbout, a good night's sleep is worth more when you study than an "all-nighter" before an exam. Short-term memory, which is key for memorization, is seriously affected by sleep deprivation.

But what phase of sleep helps us consolidate new experience? No one knew until scientists like Dr. Godbout performed studies on animals.

His work has uncovered evidence for a functional link between brain activity during "paradoxical" sleep and learning tasks that require input from the pre-frontal cortex, such as spatial orientation. This discovery corroborates the idea that assimilation of information may depend on paradoxical sleep or dreaming. But the hypothesis is not universally accepted.

The UdeM psychologist believes that people don't take the benefits of a good snooze seriously enough. "Sleep is indispensable for the organism to recuperate," he maintains. "If you deprive a rat of sleep, it will be dead in 14 days."

Researcher: Roger Godbout
Phone: (514) 338-2222
Funding: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)