Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back again to the podcast. Today we are

back discussing the exciting topic of dreaming. Now in the last episode we spoke

about one function of dreaming that of overnight therapy or emotional first aid. Today's episode is going to focus on a

second but very different function of dreaming, which is the ingenious processing and

interconnection of memories that inspires creativity and even problem solving

ability now as we've come across already in this podcast during

deep non-rem sleep which is a stage of sleep where we don't dream very much it's

during deep non-rem sleep when we take individual memories

and we strengthen those individual memories. We future-proof them in the brain.

What we've then subsequently learned however is that sleep

is much more intelligent than we thought possible because after that round of

deep non-rem sleep where we strengthen all of the individual pieces of information that we've gathered during the day,

once we go into REM sleep and start dreaming, we then take those newly saved memories

and we start colliding them and connecting them with all of our back catalog of stored information.

And you can think of Rem Sleep Dreaming as a form of informational alchemy,

and what we're doing is building new and novel

connections and associations and as a consequence we awake the next morning with a revised mind wide web of associations that is capable of

divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems.

A great illustration of dream inspired creativity

occurred on February the 17th in 1869 and it happened to the Russian chemist

Dimitri Mendelayev. Now he was trying to solve arguably

the greatest problem of his time. How do all of the known chemical elements

...