What happens to the eyes when a person Is in REM sleep?
When you're dreaming, your eyes don't know you're asleep. Michael Timothy Smith, MA, PhD, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Johns Hopkins University, explains in this Ask the Experts video.
Transcript
So the eye movements, there's not 100% clear what the functions are. It could be just an-- an aspect of just, sort of, tracking
what's going on in your dreams. But I think there are people that think there are memory aspects of it as well, that it's helping process memories.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
The basic thinking is your eyes are tracking. So when you go into-- into REM sleep, you're basically psychotic.
When I say you're psychotic, when you're dreaming, you don't know you're dreaming. You're living-- you're living in a fantasy world, typically, unless you're lucid, which means you're
conscious during your dreams. [UPBEAT MUSIC] If you're dreaming about a tennis match, and you're-- and you're in the dream,
and you're, kind of, watching the ball go back and forth, your eyes are going to be going back and forth, tracking the hallucinations that you're experiencing
in your dream. They're pretty interesting. So it's-- it's a tracking hypothesis, that you're actually just, sort of, doing that.
Now, it may be related to memory, memory issues. You know, when we often try to access memory, our eyes move in certain ways.
[UPBEAT MUSIC] So the eye movements, there's not 100% clear what the functions are.
It could be just an-- an aspect of just, sort of, tracking what's going on in your dreams. But I think there are people that
think there are memory aspects of it as well, that it's helping process memories. [UPBEAT MUSIC]
sleep disorders
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