Brain+Homework+Article


 * A NYT article on Nightmares by my favorite author, Natalie Angier**

1. What does it mean to be "gainfully" employed (line 3)? Gainfully Employed means that you are not employed full time. 2. Look up the word "Damoclesian". What does it mean that the knife dangled with "Damoclesian contempt"? Damoclesian means in a very threatning way. To hang a knife in a very threatning way that has something to do with a dangerous content. 3. What did the patient fear at night (2 things)? Having a bad dream, or feeling that they might die in their sleep. These two things are the most common fears that people claim to have during the night befoer they go to sleep 4. How did Dr. Leving help this man? Hew made the suggestion that in your dream, if you feel like you are falling then the best thing to do is to stretch out your arms and learn to fly. 5. When is the last time you had a nightmare you remember? Do you mind sharing it? If not, please do so here...     I don't really have nightmares, but i did when i was younger. I dreamed that i was being chased by a giant alvacodo but don't remeber what happened at the end of the dream. 6. What does she mean when she calls nightmares a "sensorily rich nocturnal roundhouse staffed with characters so persuasive you want to ... strangle them, before they can strangle you."? (paragraph 4) She is suggesting that all people have bad dreams, that it is just a natural way of life and there is nothing that people can do to change that. The hard part about these scary dreams is that they appear to be so life like and one has trouble distingushing it from reality. 7. What percentage of dreams are bad dreams? 60-70 percent of dreams that people report are considered to be bad dreams. 8. What is REM sleep? (You may need to look this up.) What does it stand for? What happens during REM sleep? How much REM sleep do we get in a typical night's sleep? This is about 20-25 percent of the sleep that we experience a night and can last anywhere from 90-120 minutes, the process is where your eyes sort of twitch or move a little bit. Hints why it is called Rapid Eye Movement Sleep, and typicially at the end of this period a person can brifly wake up for a short time before drifting back to sleep. 9. How much time do we spend dreaming each night? Dreaming is considered to be sleep, and the average person spends 7-8 hours sleeping every night. There are some people that require more sleep than this so they dream more, and their are some people who require less sleep than this so they dream less. Typically 90 percent is spent dreaming. 10. How does the frequency of nightmares change as we age? (Be specific with ages and number of nightmares) The older your get the more realistic your dreams get, and the more they start to make since or feel that you are actuially in them rather than them just meaning nothing at all. Or when you are younger you are more likely to not understand what dreams mean, and as you get older these typically seem to get more clearer. 11. Which parts of the brain are active during dreaming (Be specific, name the parts and their function)? The cortex is that part of the brain that gets and interpurates information, so as a result this part never sleeps and is always working while you sleep and is working with the dreams that your produce. 12. What is the possible function of bad dreams? And why are nightmares disfunctional? Dreams are a subject that one must decide for themselves on. I personially think of dreams as omans or as ways to predict what is comming in your future, and that bad dreams sould be taken as a warning sign. It's your minds way of letting you know that you are in some sort of danger in the near and present future.