Dreams help learning

Some years ago I was involved in an international project by the colleague and friend davide rosso . The basic idea behind, it's this: there is a powerful and complex relationship between dreams and learning. This multifaceted relation has been subject of inquiry for dacades and its exact nature is not fully understood.

One of the key ways in which dreams contribute learning is through a process called 'memory consolidation'. During the day, we acquire new information and experiences, but our brain cannot process and store all of them at once. It need time to sort through and consolidate this information, which is exactly where sleep comes in. When we sleep, our brain works: it consolidates and strenghten connections between neurones that encode our memories, helping to make them more stable and easy to recall.

But this is not all. Dreams do not play an important role just in memory consolidation, but they also contribute to learning by helping us process and integrate new information. Indeed, research has shown that the brain is able to continue processing and creating new connections even when we are asleep. This means that our brain is able to working on problems or task that we may have been struggling with during the day, potentially leading to new insight and solutions. So dreams are a way to explore different solutions and possibilities.

Finally, dreams may also serve as a sort rehearsal for future events or tasks, allowing us to practice and prepare for upcoming challenges. Like in the metaverso, in the dreams we create our characters, we made them interact in different scenarios and we imagine the outputs of possibles behaviors. If we think well, it's a kind of virtual training, a training in a safer place where we explore and try to figure it out which is the best way to act in order to make a better choise in 'real' (I prefer physical) life.

Someone may argue that not all dreams are necessarily related to learning. My mind is conviced by the opposite and support the fascinating idea that the brain has 2 different and simultaneous level of learning: one counscious, the other not. Put simply, dreams provide us valuable insight and perspectives that can inform our waking lives, so beside they are not a direct source of information and knowledge, we can learn from them.

The skills we can learn meanwhile dreaming can vary depending on the content and context of our dreams. However, there are a few general types people may be able to develop or improve through dreaming:

1) motor skills: in dreams we can practice some activity training our motor skills and coordination. For example, meanwhile visualizing ourselves doing a particular action - think an athlete who dream doing particular movements - specific regions of our brain get activated

2) creativity. dreams may also inspire creativity and new ideas. Many people have coming up with new inventions, art, or stories while dreaming

3) problem-solving: dreams provide a space for working through problems and challenges, where we can find the 'aha' moments or breakthroughts

4) emotional capacities: dreams are an incredible source of emotional learning and regulation. For examples, nightmares are attempts to work through through difficult emotions and painful experineces (often related with unsolved trauma).

All this implies we can use dreams to create innovative CVs and fostering all these skills in children. And this exactly what we did...but this is another story ;)