“LEARNING CURVE. Experts, novices and amnesiacs playing Tetris show different patterns of improvement over seven sessions--patterns that are in part reflected in their dreams.


A diversion? Yes. Addictive? Maybe. But a research tool for delving into the purpose of dreaming? In fact, the game Tetris has proved to be just that. Robert Stickgold and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School recently conducted a clever set of experiments in which they used the game to guide the content of people¿s dreams: among 17 subjects they trained to play Tetris, more than 60 percent reported dreaming of images associated with the game. And the researchers found that when and how the study¿s sleeping participants saw these images helps confirm the idea that the brain uses dreaming to reinforce learning. They reported their findings in the October 13 issue of Science.


The idea that sleep, and in particular dreaming, serves to cement new information and skills in the brain first gained a lot of attention when Stickgold and his colleagues described another set of findings in the March 1999 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. In this set of experiments, they showed that subjects who had slept for six hours or more after learning a new task--in this case, spotting a visual target on a screen as quickly as possible--improved, whereas those who didn¿t sleep on it didn¿t. Moreover, they found that those who improved the most slept for eight hours, with ample time for both slow-wave and rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep.
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