Des chercheurs américains ont réussi à reproduire les bienfaits du sommeil lent sur des souris en stimulant une partie de leur cerveau tout en restant éveillées. Cette technique, inspirée par les dauphins et les canards, pourrait potentiellement être testée sur les humains pour améliorer la récupération et la mémoire.
"Just as we must be responsible for our bodies in an era of office work, we must now keep our minds active," says Jamil Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab.
Sleep experts explain that vivid dreams during restless nights are not a sign of increased dream production but rather a failure of the brain's forgetting mechanism. When sleep is interrupted, particularly during REM sleep, the brain fails to delete dream memories before waking, allowing fragments to be encoded into conscious memory. The phenomenon explains why bad dreams feel so real — the prefrontal cortex, which provides logical context, is offline during REM sleep.
