107: What Dogs Dream

Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Tracy <inaudible> and I am Amy Barton and this is a brainstorm. Great. I have a brainstorm about dogs dreaming. Ooh, you ever wondered how they know that dogs dream and then how do they know what dogs dream? I've got my feet peddling like you know, and they're little, they make all kinds of sounds and their little eyelids flutter, which all those things are kind of behaviors we see in humans as well, especially the eye fluttering. But how do we know dog's brains are working like our brains and doing those same kind of things. So are they actually seeing something like we would in a dream? Oh, I always wondered what are they dreaming about? And you kind of just assume it's, I'm chasing the squirrel. Yeah, their favorite toy or how you were a jerk to them when you didn't come home or, yeah. Speaker 0 00:54 And it turns out those are the things they're dreaming about. Stanley Corin, a professor@meritusofpsychologyattheuniversityofbritishcolumbiatackledthequestionandlivescience.com has interviewed him. One of the things they've discovered is that the structure of a dog sleep is remarkably like a human sleep. It's very similar with REM cycles and non REM cycles. The lengths differ a bit, but they do have those cycles of sleep. So there's already those parallels. And for a study group, rats are easier. They're little and you can cause them to do tasks and then you can shut the door of the lab and leave him and ice. So Matthew Wilson, a cognitive scientist who researches learning and memory at the Massachusetts Institute of technology at MIT performed some rest studies in 2001 they were actually the first to find that rat's stream. And what they did is they put the rats through things like mazes and repetitive tasks and measure the brainwaves. Speaker 0 01:50 So they saw what amazed task looked like in the rats, in their brainwaves. Got it. And then they measured and watched brainwaves in sleep and in REM sleep they were able to observe those same brain waves at the same like minute for a minute. If it took them five minutes to do amaze, they might have a dream sequence of about five minutes, which is similar to our REM sleep. We have very lifelike dreams. They're very vivid and they are paced. Like we would experience them in normal like that's fascinating. Non REM sleep. They would observe similar wavelengths but they were abbreviated. It would be like that scatter of a quick and for us non REM dreams are shorter and more mundane. Your brains processing but it's not exciting and vivid and so they saw those parallels in the rats too. And so the finding that rats dream is a good indication that dreaming is common across mammals. Speaker 0 02:44 And really interestingly the non REM sleep is seen in all vertebrates and in the animal with the backbone has non REM sleep and may even extend to some invertebrates like fruit flies. So fruit flies my dream of that time you tried to them or, okay so we have two tree frogs and six salamanders and we give the tree frogs a fruit flies. They're all dreaming. All of those things would be dreaming. Isn't that crazy to think now? They're probably just dreaming about the delicious slime or if who knows? I'm just imagining the fruit flies that didn't get eaten. Who saw the other fruit flies getting eaten and they're just hanging out in the dark. How long has the fruit by lifespan? It's not very long. It's very short. It's very stress based life. Oh gosh. You had a chance to have two dreams. They were both nightmares. Speaker 0 03:32 The end. Oh yeah, and that isn't. Dogs probably have nightmares just like humans do because they would have all those, anything negative that happened in their life might come into their dreams. They can also be narcoleptic the disorder where you could fall asleep. Suddenly Stanford did some studies and they unraveled some of the human how and why of narcolepsy through dogs. Wow. I've never really thought about the how do they know what a dog is dreaming about? We know they dream, but how do you know that and that's how somebody wanted to know. Then they wrote a grant. Scientists do you do so much leg work just to get to the place where you can study to thing. Kudos to you for doing all of that paperwork, that soul crushing, and then we can sum it up and tell you about it in five minutes or less likely paired with the fart facts really, really good. Well, anytime you need another dose of random fact tacularness ask your smart speaker to play brain junk podcast. You can also find us on Twitter as at my brain junk and we're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know and I guarantee you will not be bored.