VIDEO: 7 Mysteries Science Still Can’t Explain!

Although science and technology have boomed over the last decades, there are still some things that baffle scientist to this day.

Anyone can write on Evonews. Start writing!

This video presents seven mysteries science cannot explain.

The most fascinating question must be “Why do we dream?”!

According to the National Sleep Foundation, since the earliest of recorded histories, people have theorized about the function and meaning of dreams. Answers came largely from the spirit world until Aristotle and Plato developed the drive related hypothesis that was later expanded on by the European psychoanalysts of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This hypothesis defines dreaming as a way to act out unconscious desires in a safe or “unreal” setting, presumably because to do so in reality would be unacceptable or even detrimental. But even in the 21st century we still are not sure why we dream. The only way to study dreams is to ask the dreamer.

However, one thing we know for sure is that dreaming is something that the vast majority of humans do every night of their lives.

In 1953 Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student in physiology, and Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, chair of physiology at the University of Chicago, discovered the phenomenon of rapid eye movement (REM) during a series of sleep studies. Study participants who were awakened during REM sleep invariably recalled bizarre and vivid dreams.

If awakened while eyes were motionless (non-REM sleep), participants rarely recalled dreaming. Before the REM discovery, most scientists believed that the brain was essentially inactive during sleep.

The Chicago researchers proved that the brain is indeed active during sleep, a finding that helped establish the sleep science discipline, which has led to the diagnosis and treatment of 84 known or suspected sleep disorders.

A few years after the REM discovery, Michel Jouvet, MD, of Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, recognized that brain activity during REM sleep resembles that of wakefulness.

He called REM “paradoxical sleep” because of the fact that such cognitive activity is accompanied by muscular paralysis. He referred to non-REM sleep, a time of reduced brain activation, as “quiet sleep,” in which there is no muscular inhibition.

In a pioneering study conducted by William C. Dement, MD, PhD, in 1960, the psychological effects of REM deprivation were discovered by waking subjects just as they began dreaming.

Dr. Dement observed increased tension, anxiety and irritability among his subjects along with difficulty concentrating, an increase in appetite with consequent weight gain, lack of motor coordination, feelings of emptiness and depersonalization and hallucinatory tendencies.

But even with these discoveries, the question of why we dream remains unanswered. Some researchers think dreaming might have evolved for physiological reasons. There is a great deal of neuronal activity occurring while we sleep, especially in REM, and it has been suggested that dreams may just be a meaningless by-product of this biological function.

Another theory of dreaming is put forth by Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, Professor and Chairman, Department of Psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Cartwright believes that dreams are the mechanism whereby the brain incorporates memories, solves problems and deals with emotions. In this way, she maintains, dreams are essential for our emotional health.