MISSING PIECES:

Abstract

associated with more rapid eye movements. However, some classes of antidepressant drugs completely eliminate REM in patients with few if any ill effects (1). Another fact that further complicates this story is that the most intense period of REMs is during the month before birth (1). What exactly would these fetuses, who presumably have little in the way of experience in the world, be dreaming about? Given these complications, what exactly is the purpose of sleep and dreaming? Recent research from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan may soon help us answer this question, or at least get a better look at it. The Kamitami group was able to project a novel image of what a patient was perceiving based on brain activity alone (2). They accomplished this by analyzing blood flow using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the visual cortex of the human brain. Previously, similar techniques had been used at UC Berkeley in a matching task in which fMRIs were taken as a patient viewed different scenes, and the computer A wake-up call for dream research