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Right hemisphere neural activations in the recall of waking fantasies and of dreams
Author(s) -
Benedetti Francesco,
Poletti Sara,
Radaelli Daniele,
Ranieri Rebecca,
Genduso Valeria,
Cavallotti Simone,
Castelnovo Anna,
Smeraldi Enrico,
Scarone Silvio,
D'Agostino Armando
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of sleep research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.297
H-Index - 117
eISSN - 1365-2869
pISSN - 0962-1105
DOI - 10.1111/jsr.12299
Subject(s) - psychology , narrative , cognitive psychology , functional magnetic resonance imaging , recall , inferior frontal gyrus , dream , neuroscience , linguistics , philosophy
Summary The story‐like organization of dreams is characterized by a pervasive bizarreness of events and actions that resembles psychotic thought, and largely exceeds that observed in normal waking fantasies. Little is known about the neural correlates of the confabulatory narrative construction of dreams. In this study, dreams, fantasies elicited by ambiguous pictorial stimuli, and non‐imaginative first‐ and third‐person narratives from healthy participants were recorded, and were then studied for brain blood oxygen level‐dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging on a 3.0‐Tesla scanner while listening to their own narrative reports and attempting a retrieval of the corresponding experience. In respect to non‐bizarre reports of daytime activities, the script‐driven recall of dreams and fantasies differentially activated a right hemisphere network including areas in the inferior frontal gyrus, and superior and middle temporal gyrus. Neural responses were significantly greater for fantasies than for dreams in all regions, and inversely proportional to the degree of bizarreness observed in narrative reports. The inferior frontal gyrus, superior and middle temporal gyrus have been implicated in the semantic activation, integration and selection needed to build a coherent story representation and to resolve semantic ambiguities; in deductive and inferential reasoning; in self‐ and other‐perspective taking, theory of mind, moral and autobiographical reasoning. Their degree of activation could parallel the level of logical robustness or inconsistency experienced when integrating information and mental representations in the process of building fantasy and dream narratives.