Sleep, Memory

A new study indicates that dreams may help to improve memory. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have found that subjects who dreamed about a virtual reality maze that they had been in a few hours earlier were quicker to get out of it the second time they were tested. The students who did dream about the maze did not replay the experience experience exactly—”suggesting that the dreams don’t reflect an attempt by the brain to create an exact memory of what happened, but rather an attempt to put a new memory in context of existing knowledge.”