DO ANIMALS DREAM ABOUT THEIR DAY AT WORK

If we sometimes feel that our dreams are but a rehash of our day at work, take heart - rats have the same fate. Research on the role of dreaming to secure the day's learning into long-term memory has reached deep down into the neurons of rat brains to confirm the existence of this oft-reported "rehash" phenomenon.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Learning and Memory put elecrodes into the brain cells of rats as they learned a new task at their daytime "office" - a rat maze. According to the report of his research, published in the journal Neuron, while the rats were at home at night asleep, researchers waited for the occurrence of REM sleep and noted that the same brain cell activity patterns were occurring during the rats' dreamtime as occurred while they learned their new task earlier that day in the maze. Their dreaming was just a rehash of the day at the office.