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Tetris Study Reveals Dreaming's Role In Memory 211

Posted by timothy from the link-to-your-dream-journals-everyone dept.
Cy Guy was one of the legion who wrote with this news: "Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, released results of a study of amnesiacs who had played Tetris. Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve. Stickgold hypothesizes that dreaming uses the long-term memory area that the amnesiacs retained rather that the short-term memory areas of the brain that were damaged. More information on the study is available from this Reuters article, and Harvard Med School's Focus magazine." This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.
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Tetris Study Reveals Dreaming's Role In Memory

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  • Frac + Mushrooms/ACID = INSANITY (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There was this DOS game called Frac about 10 years ago. It was a 3D tetris with a fractal background.

    One night at a party at my apartment, after I had been playing it regularly, I ate a very large mushroom cap and began hallucinating Frac.

    I locked myself in my bathroom and huddled in the corner a slave to the game taking place in front of me. When I closed my eyes it was there, when I opened my eyes it was there - superimposed on reality in front of me.

    People were outside my door and I could here them talking. If they began talking negatively or in a worried tone, the blocks would begin to fall faster and faster and I would become more and more anxious. If they went away or began talking about something positive the blocks would slow down and I became calmer.

    I spent about 3 hours captive to the Frac. After that I never played Frac again, nor did I ever take mushrooms again.

    My wife had the same thing happen to her when we went to a Sonic Youth concert. She had eaten a whole hit of acid (she usually had 1/2 tabs) and smoked some hash and we had to leave the concert because all should could see was Frac. She was freaking. We had front row at Red Rocks too.

    She never played Frac again either.

  • Re:Hmm... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Vote Gore.

    Lotteries are a tax on people that suck at math
    Voting is a tax on people that suck at math!

  • Re:Tell me something I don't already know (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, ALGORE invented that in 1967.
    He sold teh patent to the MPAA for a box of crusty :Cue:Cats.

  • Re:DooM Dreams (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've done that too... 2 nights in a row... first night was a nightmare, monsters were chasing me, woke up just before I "died".... second night (after finding the cheat codes that day) I was back in the same situation, but with all kinds of nifty stuff, like a chaingun... The second dream kicked A$$!

  • Dreaming (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I dream about boobies.

  • Yeah. Now imagine all the cool things we could do if we could harness the dreaming capacity of our minds consciously. Who needs VR. :) Dreaming could be a whole new form of entertainment, then we just figure out how to do multiuser dreams, and we're really into the realm of science fiction.

    I wonder if there's been research done on this. I'd be suprised if there hasn't; I just haven't looked. ;)

  • In the spring, Dr. Stickgold talked about Tetris and sleep on Science Friday. I enjoyed the show [sciencefriday.com].

    In high school, we played Nyet, a free Tetris clone, too much. I remember envisioning Nyet pieces while falling asleep more than any actual dreams. I would see the column covering my entire field of vision in my mind's eye. Pieces would drop down, and I'd play Nyet against myself while falling asleep. Many of my friends reported similar experiences. Many of us also saw objects, mainly buildings, in the real world and instantly imagined which pieces we'd need to to clear.

  • Only once have I ever gone completely without sleep for more than 24 hours. I was completely lucid the entire time, a total 48 hours wide awake. No one noticed anything wrong with me. No hallucinations. When it came time to fall asleep, I had to lay there for a while before I dozed off. I actually wanted to keep going but knew I'd best rest.

    When I was in school, I'd go in short of sleep every day. Like 3 hours sleep then off to school and then staying up late again that night, repeat. After a few days of that, whoa...

    Walking down the hall, heard my g/f call my name. Turned, no one there. Then went through a door, and she's at the other end of that hall. "Damn, it's only second period and I'm already hearing voices. Gonna be a long day."

    Ever try to catch what the voices are saying? That's some wierd stuff!

    The real Threed's /. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.

    --Threed
  • ...I tell them to hold out their hand!

    The real Threed's /. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.

    --Threed
  • I realized in college that I was playing too much Tetris when, during lectures, I would play games in my head. I could see the pieces falling in front of my eyes...

    But I still lost...
  • Several years ago, I was home sick with a 102 degree fever. I spent a couple hours playing Tetris, then went back to bed where the weird fever dreams kicked in. It was Jesus throwing large (50+ pounds) chunks of dirt (with brightly/strangely colored plants attached) down from heaven and I had to stack the correctly or the Earth would be destroyed. It was horribly strange dream (please make it go away!!) that counts as one of the weirdest fever dreams I have ever had.

    It was up there with hallucinating that there were assorted candy bars floating in a spiral around my bedroom when I had a fever from tonsilitus when I was about four years old...)

  • ..experiments to find out what dreaming does :/

  • Hmmm... I was playing StarCraft a couple of hours ago, and I keep hearing "Zerg sounds" now (no, it isn't my stomache grumbling). It's very irritating. Back when I was playing Terran, I would often hear SCV's and their "whirring" sound for an hour or two after playing.
  • After some long tetris sessions I seriously see tetris blocks falling in my head. If I play before I go to bed, that's all I think about while I'm trying to fall asleep. I don't know if my brain randomly picks blocks, or if I am choosing ones that will go into the slots nicely. But it can be pretty disturbing. There are worse things to dream about, I guess.
  • I've had several people very angry at me for giving them Puyo Puyo 2, as they kept dreaming of multicolor anime blobs, and even seeing them when they were awake. And these were people that had already gone through their Tetris stint. Horribly addictive game, unfortunately very hard to get in the states.

    -lx
  • yeah I can read when I dreamng. Althought I wou\ldn't have thought about it until now. Last night I had a terrible tdream that my girlfriends' brother sold my anime collection to a crusty second hand comic shop. I could read the title on the cassettes. I was livid.

    What I would like to know is if you dream in colour or black and white. I was told that apparently you dream in b/w, but I seem to dream in colour. And what abut you multi lingual folk, and dominate language you dream in? I can never remember what language I speaking in my dreams.


  • Most people dream about sex and drugs in college, whats wrong with you?
  • There has been considerable debate about the extent to which the more "abstract" aspects of procedural task memory is spared in amnesiacs. In a classic "Tower of Hanoi" task that supposedly showed amnesiacs could improve over time, considerable coaching was necessary every daily trial just to get over the severe "declarative" deficits. With this much coaching, it is more difficult to ascertain exactly what was spared, and what type of memory was being tested.

    It may be that Tetris is too darn difficult a game to be learned by whatever "simple" procedural systems are spared. Alternatively, it could be the "conditional" nature of the decisions that must be made in manipulating blocks.
  • For those of you who want to play some tetris right now, I have a win32 executable for you: Tetris.exe [coolzone.org] (276k)
  • I take it you have read "Synners [amazon.com]" by Pat Cadigan, then?

    (QnD summary: jacked individual does some funking dreaming which mutates into the wild and escapes into cyberspace)

    Neat stuff

  • Playing video games does cause brain damage.
  • I remember when XCOM: UFO Defense came out, I played it constantly every day for a week. I dreamed about it every single night and the dreams usually gave me insight as to what I was doing wrong in the game. I've also dreamed about Homeworld, Alpha Centauri and Quake. I say if you don't dream about the game. You don't let yourself become enveloped with it enough! I also used to play Nettris alot man that was a blast. Dreaming about games you play is I feel an important step in becoming excellent at that game. Because only then will the game have became an integral part of your psyche :)

  • You are a liar. That's a cliche event that you're just making up because of the topic.

    Get a life. Moderators: even if this was true, whoop de doo. Lets give him an extra point because thats neat-o.

    I don't think so

  • Heheh... I've had this happen ONCE.

    I dreamt, somehow, that I had to recode all the source for my, *ahem* 'bodily functions'... I got them written, compiled, ran it... and woke up peeing myself.

    (Good thing I wrote THAT one first!)
  • Very often I have dreams where I have a sensation of having "solved" something or thought of something important. I compose wonderful songs in my sleep sometimes, for example. The problem is that when I wake up, I realize whatever I was thinking of was actually stupid, impossible, or irrelevant. This seems to indicate your brain's "salency indicator" gets a little unhinged while you're dreaming. I wonder why?
  • Hell yeah, dude! Once I had this vision of my alarm clock as a Java object, and I had to call the correct method to get it to shut off, but I didn't have any interface documentation... Don't ask me to explain how I "saw" my clock as an object, because I knew it was still the alarm clock; in dreams, you tend to think more in concepts, and in getting shoved into the perceptive layer they get mangled in illogical ways (i.e. "seeing" the concept of an object).
  • Sometimes I dream about the spreadsheets and reports that I write. If I wake up either naturally or because of my alarm and I'm delerious enough, I'll actually try to fall back to sleep to finish what I was working on.

  • Sheesh. Me too. The other big bug I come across with slashdot is when I get moderator points. IE can't handle 300+ moderator boxes. I can only go to the new topics, and even then sometimes the mod boxes dissapear.
  • I remember having several dreams about Grandia (back when I was playing it). I would "play" for several hours at a time, completing adventures that didn't even exist! Afterwards, when I was actually *playing* the game, I remember being disappointed by the comparitively low quality of the stories. :-)

    Grandia was a fun game, I should play it again...
  • Heh. Dreamt I was in Quake IIIa once... right before it came out... talk about scary! Phew! Man. I don't like out running alien looking things with a rocket launcher unless I've got a nice piece of glass between me and it.

  • One of the worst nights of my life was studying for an astronomy final. The 2 hours of sleep that I got before the 9 am test were a bizare state of semi-consciousness in which I imagined that MY ROOM was a model of the solar system. I'm not even kidding, it was like "the chair is jupiter, the books are its moons... farther from that is Neptune, which is my coffee mug". I think I pulled off a C at least, I don't remember.
  • I have dreamed about tetis, Bust A Move 2nd edition, and occactionally Gnibbles.

    Dreaming seems to able to recall long bouts of heavy congnitive load. So dreaming of Tetris would be more a common occurance, than writing a bike, or running. But why are falling dreams reported most often?
  • You're lucky. I could never member the dreams exactly but I do know I had a dream about being chased by a cyber demon a couple of times.

    I used to wake up scared out of my wits.

    I played way too much of that game.

    Aaron
  • yea i guess, although i definately was always baked when i was playing for 4 straight hours
  • i played about 2-3 hours a day average with maybe 3-5 on the weekends, i think it's the prolonged exposure that causes the dreaming though, after about 2 months i dreamt nothing but tetris all night long
  • i never went by score, i played the windows version and the score would roll over. i just counted lines, my max was about 450, but i saw a guy get 520 while he was bitching out his annoying girlfriend on the phone. truly the most impressive bit of gaming i've ever seen.

  • Remember, tetris is about realtime calculation, not about problem solving. I don't think this is suprising at all, really, because I don't see how dreaming about tetris can give you practice at it (since there is no set problem to solve) unless your dreams are really accurate ;), or speed up your thinking at the time you actually play it (see practice).

    I don't think this experiment was well-chosen. It'd be more interesting with some more non-realtime strategic game, or something similar with set problem forms.

    Then again, I've been rather interested in sleeping and dreaming and have observed some interesting things, such as the sleep transition period, and some dreams themselves. I've found that there isn't a point where you "fall asleep," it's much more of a stretch of time and change of consciousness where your thoughts about doing something become you actually doing it. It's like being able to remember intellectually the taste of chocolate, but a wall of consciousness slowly disappears and you really can taste it.

    As you said, though, this isn't usually something you tend to remember.

  • Or possibly your falling triggered the dream sequence, and you woke up some time later.

  • Sokoban (Score:2)

    by acb ( 2797 )
    Once when I downloaded Sokoban for my Pilot and was playing it a bit, I found myself dreaming of shifting boxes around a maze to clear a path. The weird thing was, the Sokoban dream was (in some incomprehensible way) a metaphor for some real-world problem or social conundrum.
  • "Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve."

    Does this mean I will not improve?

    --ken
  • I can remember dreaming about playing deathmatch.. it was really weird, because the 'map' was my school, but the dark red marine sprite was running around - but i recognised him as my mate Toby.

    And when I saw Toby run under a bridge that I was standing on, I shouted in my dream, "You can't do that! Its not true 3D!"

    weird.
  • Wasteland... oh dead god, wasteland... i can honestly say that i played that game since the year it came out... and i am not proud to admit this, i *just* beat it july of this year. It was the only role playing game i've ever played, and i would play it in binges, and then forget about it for 2 years... i have had some *really* screwed up wasteland dreams. About being trapped in the Guardian Citadel, about having to deal with the Serpedroids, the Sewers, the red ryder BB gun with compas in stock...

    Just this july i beat it, i had proton axes, i had the power armor, i had it all... and i beat it. i can honestly say, that i can die a happy man now.
  • If you do see someone you don't know, you did see them and your mind did store it, but you where aware of it.

    Interesting assertion. The amount of research necessary to move your assertion past the mere hypothesis stage would itself be a rather daunting task. Know of any peer-reviewed journal papers that back it up?

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • Not only have I read during dreams, I have read in such detail that I once noted the magazine's date and article title so I could re-read it, and remembered the reading experience when I was awake without realizing I had dreamed it. I only realized it was a dream upon actually attempting to re-read it, and finding no trace of the article in the magazine.

    Lao Tzu may have noted the conundrum centuries before I did, but I did experience it years before I heard of the Butterfly Dream.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • It's not the blocks I dream about, it's that fucking theme song!

    MAKE THE MUSIC STOP! AAAGH!

    (See, I was fine up until this story was posted. Then the Tetris music slammed back into my head at full volume. DAMN YOU. DAMN YOU TO HELL.)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Does anyone ever remember actually reading something during a dream?

    Yes, I've been able to read during dreams. But it is a strange type of 'reading'. I can only read in chunks, not a single word at a time. And the chunks are very ephemeral, no re-reading.

    It is rare that this happens. Most times the words are just gibberish. But it has happened during the 'exam dream'. I'm no longer in school so I when I have this dream it is about a class that I haven't been attending and now have a test. I can read the question and start to answer but then the either the questions change or I realize in the dream that I'm no longer in school so I must be dreaming.

    Everyone I've talked to about the 'exam dream' has had similar experiences (sans the bit about being able to read).

    I've also played sports and I and those who I've talked about this with who played sports have the 'sports dream'. It goes like this. I'm playing soccer, the goal is open, but the ball is just out of reach. Friends who played baseball are trying to field the ball but it stays just out of reach. Football players have a passed ball stay just out of reach. The ball never gets by, it just stays out of reach.

    The curious thing about these dreams is the indeterminate nature. In the baseball dream you don't field the ball, but you don't not field the ball. It just stays out of reach.

    Steve M

  • A similar thing happend to me with code. When I was in grad school working on a problem late into the night I would occasionally dream about the problem.

    Local regions of the code would be correct, but the code elsewhere would change, but like your equations, the code would change in correct ways locally, although globally it wouldn't work.

    I actually solved a handful of problems this way. Including a partularly troublesome one in a formal lingo class.

    Steve M

  • From the Reuters story: They said people with amnesia who played the popular computer game Tetris dreamed about the images it invoked, but could not remember actually playing the game. And, unlike people with normal memories, they never really got any better at the game. This shows that when the brain is filing away the memories it needs to keep, it has to go through a series of steps, and dreaming is a manifestation of one crucial step, Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) in Boston, who led the study, said.

    Far from showing that dreaming is a crucial step, this would seem to show that dreaming is irrelevant.

    If dreaming were important we would expect the dreamers to improve. Yet they did not.

    big ears' comment above about amnesics having functional procedural memory would seen to support this interpretation.

    Steve M

  • When I was taking a lot of math in college I had a dream about wrestling an equation like it was a snake. As the shape of the snake changed, the symbols that it was composed of appeared to adapt in mathematically correct ways.
    Very strange.
  • I've experienced far worse than the tetris dream. It's been over 7 years now, and I'm still recovering. I've told others, and now I'm telling you: You don't know true horror until you've dreamed in QBasic.
  • Back when I first started playing Doom, I would go until four in the morning. I would go lie down, and in that odd state between waking and dreaming, I would see walls, columns, rooms...never any antagonists, just the 3-D textured environment moving around in my head.
  • As another Cognitive Scientist, I agree that the results do seem contrary to what we know about amnesia.

    I'd need to read the actual study though, because the article doesn't specify whether the patients had anterograde or retrograde amnesia. A patient with anterograde amnesia who, by definition, is unable to remember post-tramatic events or form new memories, does improve at skill tasks almost as fast as an unaffected person.

    Someone with retrograde amnesia shouldn't show any difference in being able to learn Tetris, as long as they hadn't played before the trauma.

    Kevin Fox
  • As the article says, people didn't actually dream they were playing the game. They dreamt about falling blocks.

    I've frequently had dreams about games, usually myself being in the game, rather than playing it.

    -Ben
  • This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.

    And yet, just like the amnesiacs, you do not get better at it. You trying to tell us something here timothy?

  • Anybody remember Wasteland? I had this dream that I couldnt get out of Femister's head... fairly realistic, as it took me weeks to figure this one out.

    I also had Ultima IV dreams, Pools of Radiance, and Bard's Tale Dreams.

    i think i played too many RPG games as a kid...


    tagline

  • You just needed to tell the compiler to Do What I Mean...

  • The first class I took in digital design as a freshman -- you know, when you first learn things like Grey code and NAND gates and spend your time breadboarding with TTL chips -- once involved some really hairy bit patterns.

    My roommates told me one morning that I had spent a couple minutes reciting strings of binary in my sleep, finishing with, "It just won't add up!"

    I have no recollection whatsoever. :-)

  • I loaded in Quake and played for the first time in years yesterday. When I went to bed that night, I couldn't get any images to sit still in my head - they were all "jumping" like you when running around in Quake and moving around like crazy. This was before I even fell asleep. I had to keep opening my eyes to get things to settle down.

    My dreams were just as bad. Made for a crappy night of sleep.
    ---
  • See, you THINK that dream makes no sense, but your brain is trying to tell you something, man.

    Picture this: a tray that fits into a 5 1/4 drive bay... probably two bays, actually, but that's OK, everyone needs a full-tower case anyway. You drop a potato into the tray, wait ten minutes or so while your hash brown program does its thing, and voila... gnu browns!

    This is such an amazing idea. I'm telling you, your brain is goddamn smart. I bet we can get some VCs interested in this. I mean, c'mon, who wouldn't love a pile of fresh hash browns right about now...

    (This is what happens when I don't get enough sleep and I skip breakfast...)
  • I remember reading that one of the reasons for sleep, was so that the glial cells in the brain could recharge their stores of energy (the brain uses more energy than can be supplied to it by the bloodstream, so the glial cells provide the extra energy required).

    Perhaps the reason that the REM sleep is postponed until later in the sleep cycle, is to give those glial cells a chance to recharge (since I would imagine that the REM sleep probably burns a fair amount of energy in at least parts of the brain).
  • Heh recently I started playing FF8 - and once again i remembered why i don't play many games. I start to dream about them (esp when a 6 hour session of sitting there after work playing is the last thing that I do before bed)

    Its really weird - normally I don't dream much. However when I play for long periods, I almost always dream about it.

    The only other thing that has had that much of an effect on my dreaming is reading. Sometimes reading a good book before bed will REALLY do some weird things (of course, when i noticed this I was reading the Illuminaus! Triology)

    As for waking up...only had the alarm clock thing once. I was walking into a hotel and the person at the desk suddenly opened her mouth and started singing...then I went upstrairs and someone else was doing it...same song... and it was in spanish!

    Then I woke up and heard the radio blaring o/~ I am carlos santana o/~

    -Steve
  • I was in college when the tetris craze first started. I realized I was playing it far too much when I started dreaming about playing Tetris. I very rarely remember my dreams, so I figured it was significant that I remembered this one.

    I quit cold turkey and haven't really played much since.
  • It's funny, there's also a reverse of the exam dream, that teachers get. I've talked to a number of teachers who have the dream that they've got to prepare an exam for a class they've forgotten about all year.

    These kinds of dreams seem to be universal constants; I think they are related to the "showing up at work/school naked" dreams. Dreams where there is a sense of being completely unprepared or unable to complete a given task. I wonder what exactly our minds are trying to cross reference with those...

  • Does this mean I will not improve?

    You have missed something. All of the subjects PLAYED the game first.

  • The cycles of dreams do happen on about 90 minute cycle, but there is a difference between start of sleep and end of sleep.

    At the start of sleep, you spend most of the time in the Stage 1-4 sleep, where your body tries to get the physical effects of the day flushed out. (rest physically).

    Every 90 minutes you go back from the stage 4 sleep into REM sleep, which lasts upto 10 mins at start. After about first 4 hours of sleep, you start to spend more of those 90 minutes in REM and less in stage 2-4. By the time you are ready to wake up from the 8 hour (supposed best number of hours to sleep) sleep, you start to spend almost 45 minutes at a time in the REM sleep, seeing those cool dreams you rememember in the morning.

    This is all I can remember from my intro Psych course.

  • You may laugh but it's been my idea for a while to have something which fits into a 5 1/4 inch drive bay into which you can put a little water and some coffee grounds and get piping hot coffee right at your PC.

    So if you see this patented sometime, this is prior art.

    Rich

  • maybe I just code too much but often I'll have weird mixed dreams where real life things happen, as I see the code for those things to happen..

    for example:
    wife: "could you do the dishes?"
    me: "sure. boolean dishesclean=dishWasher.start(dishes);"

    the weird part is that I don't type it in or say it or anything, it just appears overlaying the rest of the dream.

  • This finding seems to be generally consistenty with previous theories of the function of sleep and dreaming. Basically, the idea is that sleep and dreaming occurs to provide the brain an opportunity not only to rest, but to sift, sort, and integrate information that is gained throughout the day. That's why when you work intensely at something for hours, it's likely to appear in dreams.

  • Most people dream about sex and drugs in college

    Well, the sex can be replaced with Tetris (imagine the 4-stick is a penis [ucla.edu]). Now you're left with Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com].

  • Every did DMT playing tertris [sic]

    No, but I have done virtual DMT playing Tetris. (It's called Tetripz [mutefantasies.com].) I decided to replicate the experience in open source, and the result was TOD: Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com].

  • a 330 KB Tetris clone called Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com]. It's one of the few Tetris clones with a framerate. The included exe is for DOS, but it includes GPL'd source and recompilation instructions for Windows and Linux.
  • What if Tetris itself could simulate the drugs itself? It'd probably be a bit like Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com] for DOS and Linux.

  • a lawsuit against ... for infringing on their computer game Tetris.

    The ironic thing is that this actually happened. A cloner got a nastygram [slashdot.org] about "Bedtris" infringing on the TETRIS® trademark; it was changed to Bedter. A followup letter accused the cloner of infringing on look-and-feel copyright.

  • Didn't the Tetris Company [tetris.com] try to sue clone developers [slashdot.org] such as Pin Eight Software [8m.com]?

  • a game of tetris that I had to solve that was simply out of control.

    Psychedelic Tetris dream? Did it look anything like Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com]?

  • Play Tetanus On Drugs [8m.com]. It's a Tetris clone for Linux, DOS, and Windows that (poorly) simulates the effect of hallucinogenic drugs.
  • You need a bigger challenge: playing Tetris under the influence [8m.com].

  • One intersting thing, is if you are deprivated of sleep for an extended amount of time (ie. more than a couple days), when you finally do get to sleep, your REM will come in shorter terms, last longer and be of higher "quality".

    Also in your term of sleep deprevation (when you are wake and deprivated of sleep), you mind will "know" it needs REM sleep to clear your inbox, so it tries to "trick" you into it, this is why you hear or see things that aren't real after a couple days sleep deprivation.

    This things you hear or see that aren't real are nothing more than "hard drive files" loading into "RAM" so your "CPU" can cross-reference and determine where to "store" your current "cache" onto "disk". When you are loading, writting files, you have to open them, during this time you may expeirence so "unwanted" effects.

    Basically this unreal voices and visions are REALLY _REAL_, they are nothing but REAL memory "blocks" coming into the current mind. They aren't real to everyone else, but they are REAL in the sense they are REAL memories.

    That is why, you will never see anyone you don't know in your dreams. If you do see someone you don't know, you did see them and your mind did store it, but you where aware of it. Like if you look into a 1000 person crowd, you see "all" of them, but your "current" aware mind doesn't bring the current image of everyone to your "stack".


  • Same thing used to happen with me after marathon Doom sessions. It's a sad commentary on how much I let computers assimilate me that I found it really amusing. Strangely enough, I don't remember actually dreaming of it once I did fall asleep...
    --
  • If my mind takes that long to purge it's inbox, I'm getting too much mail.
  • This must explain why I dream about sex so much... I haven't gotten any in so long, that it's moved to my long-term memory, instead of my short-term.
  • Thank goodness I am not the only person that dreams about tetris. I thought I was some sort of freak or something. I often dream that I am part of the falling blocks, and I fall along with them. What is really weird, is sometimes I will wake up on the floor, appearently fallen from my bed. Now what I would like to know...is if my dream caused me to roll off my bed, or if the entire dream occured once I was in the air on the way to the floor...

    After some reading and discussion with my friends, I found out that more of your brain is being utilized during dreaming than during the day. That is why everything can seem so real. Dream reality is more real than regular reality because our mind thinks it is. Not only that, but and entire 6 hour dream sequence can take place in a matter of minutes or seconds.. This proves that our brain works about 300 times harder when we reach REM sleep than when we are awake. Some weird stuff.


  • What I find most interesting about the article is that it says

    People in both groups reported that, as they fell asleep, they dreamed about images of blocks falling and rotating, as they do on the computer screen when the game is in progress. They did not actually dream about the game itself.

    I remember that when I used to play tetris (well actualy Hextris [tander.com]) in college way too much that I DID dream about the game.....
    I remembered deleting rows
    I remembered running out of space and eventualy losing the game
    And worst of all I would remember that as usual I had failed to beat my girlfriend's high score...
  • It's pretty funny actually, I get the same thing while cramming for final exams. The night before the exam I usually end up having a nightmare about solving problems, and I never, ever get them right (sometimes I wonder if my dream problems even have correct answers!). I always do good on my exams though. Maybe it's just my brain compiling all my problem solving techniques!
  • No wonder so many people are so good at those Lara Croft games.
  • Dont you worry. Soon enough you'll met a tall stranger, who will fit nicely by your side, and then him, you and everyone else at your side will disappear.
  • I remember when I was hooked on X-Com Apocalypse once. When I started involuntarily getting confused about people in real life moving around when they shouldn't have movement points left, I stopped playing.

    Games can be dangerous ;)

  • Please explain this "sleep" concept everyone keeps writing about. What is this "sleep"?

  • That's nothing. I once played Civilization (the original) so long that when I looked away, the whole world was pixellated. I couldn't tell what time it was because the Settlers wouldn't quit irrigating the clock...
    ___ CmdrTHAC0 ___

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:09AM (#707789)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Dreaming about games (Score:3)

    by Pfhreakaz0id ( 82141 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @10:04AM (#707790)
    It's calleed letting your subconcious solve problems. Remember, your subconcious can go right on thinking while your concious brain is sleeping or otherwise engaged. I used to be into meditation when I was in college, and I would use this technique to help me organize the vast amounts of research I did into a coherent structure for a paper. I would go into meditation, instruct my subconcious to work on a problem, and a few days later, sit down and write out a perfect outline, or bang out a great short-paper. or whatever. I got pretty good at it. You may think this is bullshit. But it worked. Great.

    I don't recall any of the books I read, but I was SERIOUS about it. I meditated daily for 20 minutes. I should get back into that. It was fun.
    ---

  • Mind - Brain Interaction (Score:3)

    by frank249 ( 100528 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @09:51AM (#707791)
    "Dreams are the mind watching the brain processing memories," Stickgold says.

    Actually the mind does more than just watch. There has been some recent research on mind - brain interaction. When we go to sleep there is some part of us that some refer to as the 'mind' that stays awake or alert. If the parts of the brain are the hardware, the mind is the operating system. It monitors our bodily systems and does some of the housekeeping chores while we sleep. There has been lots of research on biological clocks and why some people seem to be able to wake up before their alarm goes off. The big question was how does the mind communicate with the body? Recent research indicates that the mind uses the stress reaction as a way to wake up the body. Stress hormones 'arouse' the body systems like breathing, blood pressure, heart rate etc.

    Researchers confirmed this in lab tests. They had two groups of test subjects wired in a sleep lab. The first group were told that they were to be woken up at 8:00AM. At 07:30 they noticed that levels of stress hormones started to gradually increase and by 08:00 reached a peak. In the second group, the subjects were also told that they were to be woken at 08:00 but instead were woken at 06:00AM. Prior to waking the subjects stress hormones levels were low but immediately after being woken unexpectedly the stress levels rose dramatically to peak levels.

    What is still unclear is whether dreaming is caused by stress hormones or are used by the mind to induce the stress reaction.

    Whatever the function of dreaming is, it doesn't require us to remember. Not remembering dreams is like dubbing tapes with the volume turned down," he explains. "The underlying process still gets carried out.

    I would have to disagree with the author on this point. Many people remember their dreams. The trick is to write notes immediately after waking as the memory of the dream seems to fade quickly.

  • this also explains (Score:3)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:15AM (#707792) Homepage
    all those funky starcraft dreams i've been having...

    there he is zerglings, get him!
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057

  • Dreams (Score:3)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:35AM (#707793) Homepage

    If you stay up for extended amounts of time, denying yourself REM sleep, the body forces REM "sleep" or REM funcation on the waking body.

    This is why moderators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H crack addicts seems so "weird". There "inbox" is full and all the data from their "inbox" needs to be filed though REM sleep, without sleep for days (even weeks), the mind has to purge their "inbox" while the person is still wake. This is why they "see" or "hear" things that aren't real.

    Also what is instersting, is that if you deny yourself REM sleep for an extended amount of time (like not sleeping ANY for days or weeks), then when you finally do sleep, the REM part of sleep will be "stronger" and last longer. A way for the mind to (apparently) catch up on REM sleep.

    Also an intersting fact (err theogry, I don't remember who came up with this theogry), is that when they did a study on schizopheric (sp?) vs "normal" people, schizopheric indivauls had less REM sleep and for shorter intervauls. His theogry was that this "visions" and "voices" that schizopheric indivauls where expeirence was that the mind did "know" when the right time to induce REM sleep, and that schizopheric indivauls where suffering from a funcation in the brain that induce REM "sleep" at the wrong time. Also part of his theogry was that if you could force REM "sleep" on schizopheric indivauls when they where REALLY sleeping, that alot, if not most (but not all) schizopheric effects in the indivauls would be greatly reduced to non-exist.

    He theogry is yet proven. It makes some sense.

    Also, this is a fact (don't have a reference though) is that when you sleep, you rotate between "deep" and REM sleep, every 90 minutes or so you going into REM sleep for awhile, then back into deep sleep. This is repeated till you wake up. There isn't ONE REM sleep, but 2-5 during your sleep cycle depending on how long you sleep and other factors can have effects it, the length of it, or the quality of it.

    What I want to do, is that REM sleep (to me atleast, this isn't a fact, just my BS) is simplair to an LSD trip. What I would like to test, if have some one (I would do it!) study and work like normal, but at night instead of 8 hours sleep, do 2 hours sleep and then take LSD for the other time. Do a before and after type of thing. Get some material, some subject, it doesn't matter what, lets say LISP or small talk. And in the "normal" (without LSD), find a way to judge how much one learns during this time. Then during the "trip" days find a way to judge how much one learns during the time.

    Just wondering how LSD effect memory, since it appears (atleast to myself) to have like effect of those during REM sleep.

    Actucally I just want to do LSD and play teteris and call it "research".

    "No I am not freaking out man, holy crap, I am Jesus Christ for MY sake and you won't leave me alone to play teteris? You go now!"


  • Dreaming about games (Score:3)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:20AM (#707794) Homepage Journal
    I've a pretty serious gamer... my experience with dreaming about a game is this:
    I dream about spots I have difficulty completing. And sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night with the solution. I write it down, go back to sleep, then try it the next day and it works!
    This was when I was a kid playing "Quest for Glory" and games in the "adventure" genre. Tetris, though? I don't think so...


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??

  • Re:dreaming (Score:3)

    by RhetoricalQuestion ( 213393 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:44AM (#707795) Homepage

    If you dreamed about your girlfriend as much as you dreamed about work, she wouldn't think you were on crack.

    Then again, if you spent enough time with your girlfriend such that you started dreaming about her instead of work, you'd probably be fired and subsequently dumped for being an unemployed bum.

    Then you'd have no girlfriend and no job, but your dreams would be WAY more fun.

  • Hmm... (Score:4)

    by jonfromspace ( 179394 ) <jonwilkins AT gmail DOT com> on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:11AM (#707796)
    "Dreams are just the body's way of clearing out the mental ''in-box'', Stickgold said."

    Ok, now all we have to do is code a little VBS Dream Virus, which when the brain is clearing it's "in-box", will be relayed into other peoples dreams, and so-on... thus creating a pseudo-mind-control method... First Virus... - Vote Gore.

  • Related. (Score:5)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:14AM (#707797) Homepage
    There was a related study done of amnesiacs who hated tetris and then were forced to play tetris. Not only did they remember that they hate tetris, but over 73% of them asked to be made an amnesiac again so that they could forget that the evil Russians had ever made the game.

    Amongst female college students, over 70% of them dreamed of tetris, but failed to improve. However, Dr. Stickgold hypothesised that the over 14 hours of daily Minesweeper play might have interfered.

  • Perspective from a Cognitive Neuroscientist (Score:5)

    by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:54AM (#707798) Homepage
    What really surprises me about this is that the amnesics did not improve. One consistent finding is that your standard temporal-lobe amnesic has trouble with declarative, not procedural memory. (i.e. they would not remember playing tetris the next day, but they they would play better.) Something is probably wrong with their experiment if amnesics did not improve.

    It has long been known that sleep affects memory consolidation. For instance, we all fall asleep every night, but we almost never remember falling asleep, or the events that take place up to about five minutes before. In fact, a lot of people who claim that they 'have conversations while asleep' or 'sleepwalk' are actually awake during this time, but they don't consolidate those memories and so don't remember it.

  • I have a dream... (Score:5)

    by 64.28.67.48 ( 217783 ) on Friday October 13, 2000 @08:15AM (#707799)
    I have a dream where little oddly-blocks are not judged by the color of their surface, but by their ascii character-equivalents.

    -------------

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