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Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamit

admin2016-06-30  74
问题     Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep. A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography(EEG).
    The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams six or seven times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports.
    Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences, but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor. The researchers extracted key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories—such as "car", "male", "female" and "computer"—that appeared most frequently in their dream reports. Kamitani and his colleagues then selected photos representing each category, scanned the participants’ brains again while they viewed the images, and compared brain activity patterns with those recorded just before the participants were woken up.
    The researchers analyzed activity in brain areas V1, V2 and V3, which are involved in the earliest stages of visual processing and encode basic features of visual scenes, such as contrast and the orientation of edges. They also looked at several other regions that are involved in higher order visual functions, such as object recognition.
    In 2008, Kamitani and his colleagues reported that they could decode brain activity associated with the earliest stages of visual processing to reconstruct images shown to participants. Now, they have found that activity in the higher order brain regions could accurately predict the content of the participants’ dreams. "We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams," says Kamitani. "By analyzing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75 -80%. " The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggest that dreaming and visual perception share similar neural representations in the higher order visual areas of the brain.
    Kamitani’s team are now trying to collect the same kind of data from the rapid eye movement(REM)stage of sleep, which is also associated with dreaming. This is more challenging but worth well. "Knowing more about the content of dreams and how it relates to brain activity may help us to understand the function of dreaming. "
The passage suggests that higher order visual regions of the brain______.
选项 A、are not involved in basic visual processing
B、have the main function of object recognition
C、are related to the prediction of dream content
D、contain nerves that form dream images
答案C
解析 推断题。由题干关键词higher order visual regions可定位至第四段和第五段。其中第五段第二句提到activity in the higher order brain regions could accurately predict the content of the participants’dreams，因此[C]“与梦境内容的预测有关”为答案。原文第四段虽然提到这个区域与objectrecognition等形象活动有关，但并不能由此推断这个区域与基本的视觉处理无关，也不能说这个区域的主要功能就是识别物体，故排除[A]和[B]；虽然原文讲到由这个区域的活动可推测梦境内容，但是并没有说这个区域包含形成梦境内容的神经，故排除[D]。
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