" From wet dreams to adaptive change"

Or

(a book project, 2015 )

by N. Ivn Contreras, Ph.D. (Neurochemist)

" From wet dreams to adaptive change"

Book chapters:
1. Memory & memoirs: a general overview
2. Why memoirs are fallible: they change during dreaming,
specially in REM phase.
3. Memory storage & reconstruction involves synaptic
modulation and reshaping
4. How novel wakeful experiences are after-rehearsed
during dreams, and both count as significant experiences
5. Significant experiences are always complex,
involving sensing, cognition, emotions & else
6. How memoirs are reassessed by dreaming and
cognition: fear & other emotions as dream triggers
7. Mood and dreams: why and how moods influence
memory appraisal. The role of sleep erections and pericoital
context on memory processing and reconsolidation:
neurosystemic mechanisms
8. The goal of psychotherapy (individual well-being) vs. the
goal of evolution (species survival): how they differ.
Epistemologic implications.
9. Individual adaptation, creativity & the freaky: the
teleonomic logics of mind, culture & mankinds evolution
10. Dreams & individuals choices

A brief introduction:
Public awareness of the fallibility of human memories has
been on the rise for the last few decades. This is particularly
noticed by the relative loss of legal weight assigned nowdays
to single-witness testimonies in criminal trials and lawsuits,
as well as by reports of notorious criminal cases where
harsh prison sentences being served have been revised as a
consequence of their being based on single-eyewitness
condemning evidence. Even though man can only grasp the
notion of his own existence on the basis of the memories
that inhabit his mind, particular memoirs are not necessarily
faithful records of personal experiences. In fact memories
change (of course, many times only subtly) and they do so
not only as a result of forgetting, but quite frequently also as
a result of onirically-driven reconstructions of many of the
mental records of the past. Memory reshaping is not subject
to will either, but seems to be the product of complex
processes now meticulously studied, many of which occur
during night dreaming, perhaps as much in man as in most
animal species endowed with a Central Nervous System.
Neuroscientists have now provided robust evidence that
sleep, in its different types, is essential not only to memory
acquisition but also to learning, and that both these
phenomena critically depend on synaptic reconstruction, i.e.,
interneuronal contact reshaping. Dreaming episodes occur
during particular phases of sleep ( often during REM periods
). A concensus seems to be growing on the notion that every
night, during REM sleep, recent wakeful experiences, or
symbolic elements of them, are replayed offline (afterrehearsed) in dreams. Significant novel
experiences somehow reverberate in our dreaming screens,
along with emotionally related past memories, providing
opportunities for them to interact, become linked and
codified together according to the different elements that
conform such experiences. Apart from by non-random
emotional commonalities between them the process appears
to be also guided by the time-sequences experienced. Hard
evidence proves that synaptic plasticity., i.e. changes in

synaptic efficacy of interneuronal contacts, is the key

phenomenon thanks to which not only memory acquisition,
but also learning as such, and probably also
psychotherapeutic (or maddening?) events take place in our
brains every night if we are lucky enough not to suffer from
serious sleep disturbances. Sleep penile-erections may
well play an important role in the modulation of these
phenomena during adaptive biological evolution.

Some illustrative reference links to free full texts:

1. Sleep, plasticity and memory from molecules to whole-brain networks. Abel T et al.,
Curr Biol. 2013 Sep 9;23(17):R774-88
2. Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Walker MP, van
der Helm E., Psychol Bull. 2009 Sep;135(5):731-48
3. Oversimplification in the study of emotional memory. Bennion KA et al., J Int
Neuropsychol Soc. 2013 Oct;19(9):953-61
4. The septal area, site for the central regulation of penile erection during waking and
rapid eye movement sleep in rats, Gulia KK, Neuroscience. 2008 Oct 28;156(4):106473
5. Incorporation of presleep stimuli into dream contents, Cipolli C et al, J Sleep Res.
2004 Dec;13(4):317-26