Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: Revealing the Secret Lives of Animals by Karen Shanor & Jagmeet S. Kanwal

Author:Karen Shanor & Jagmeet S. Kanwal [Shanor, Karen & Kanwal, Jagmeet S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Animals, Non-Fiction, Natural History, Science
ISBN: 9781848310957
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2009-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Animals that dream and what they dream about

And perchance to dream? Humans average four dreams a night, but usually remember only about one a week. Most of us believe that animals dream. We’ve watched our dog or cat sniff or yelp softly as they slept. We’ve seen their legs moving as if in a run while the pets were obviously sound asleep. Scientists have known for a long time that animals dream. But Matthew Wilson and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology were the first team of scientists to find out what animals are dreaming about, and that their dreams are complex. Wilson and his graduate student, Kenway Louie, gave rats a food reward for running on a circular track—and tested what brain cells were activated during this task. Later, as the rats slept, the MIT researchers found that the same neurons fired during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep—the sleep stage in which most dreams occur—as had fired during the earlier waking activity on the track, and were even able to tell what part of the track or maze each rat was on during certain times in the dream testing. The rats were dreaming about what they had done that day and putting it into long-term memory. With the aid of their dreamstate, they were learning.

Before this research, only a few animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins were thought to be able to recall and evaluate sequences of events after they occurred. This study proves that rats and probably many more types of animals can remember and re-evaluate events previously experienced. As complex as these dreams were, Wilson suspects that non-lab animals have even more complicated dreams, because they lead more interesting lives. His rats were quite sheltered. Furthermore, Wilson and Louie found that each rat had its own signature pattern of brain waves—just as Karl Pribram of Stanford and Georgetown universities has found with human subjects. This signature pattern of individual animal brain waves is still not known by much of the scientific community, although it has wide implications.

So, from frogcicles to dreamstates—various hibernation levels, sleep and dreams are just some of the many animal secrets that humans are beginning to probe and find endlessly fascinating.

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