Spanò, G;
Pizzamiglio, G;
McCormick, C;
Clark, IA;
De Felice, S;
Miller, TD;
Edgin, JO;
... Maguire, EA; + view all
(2020)
Dreaming with hippocampal damage.
eLife
, 9
, Article e56211. 10.7554/eLife.56211.
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Abstract
The hippocampus is linked with both sleep and memory, but there is debate about whether a salient aspect of sleep – dreaming – requires its input. To address this question, we investigated if human patients with focal bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia engaged in dreaming. We employed a provoked awakening protocol where participants were woken up at various points throughout the night, including during non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep, to report their thoughts in that moment. Despite being roused a similar number of times, dream frequency was reduced in the patients compared to control participants, and the few dreams they reported were less episodic-like in nature and lacked content. These results suggest that hippocampal integrity may be necessary for typical dreaming to occur, and aligns dreaming with other hippocampal-dependent processes such as episodic memory that are central to supporting our mental life.
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