Dream research has probably been going on in some form since Adam. The Rapid Eye Movement (REM) portion of sleeping was defined as such in the middle of the last century and has been a research topic of great interest ever since. It is thought that the mechanisms at work during REM help to consolidate learned events into memory. Hagewoud, et al.(2010) found that sleep deprivation and the timing of when in the sleep cycle that it occurs is important to the retention of memories.
A point of conjecture for just how much sleep is needed and what is really going on when REM occurs at various lengths of time has been that possibly as more learning experiences are acquired, the new information takes more time to be woven into the existing consolidated fabric of memories.(Gina R. Poe, Christine M. Walsh, & Theresa E. Bjorness, 2010) There may be much more going on here than defragmenting the internal hard drive. Walker & Stickgold (2010) consider the possibilities of significant processing tasks are taking place during multiple REM episodes throughout a sleep cycle.
Most people spend anywhere from 6 to 10 hours sleeping each night. The questions that come to mind are: Could there be an opportunity here to tap into the cycle of sleep to learn through virtual experiences what most currently spend what appears to be an excessive amount of time in school learning today? Could there possibly be a way to train complex tasks to a sleeping subject who could then take what is learned to be applied when awake? Could this become the ultimate immersive application of the emergent virtual education environments?
The concept of Game Based Learning (GBL) would seem to be an appropriate venue for injecting experiential learning into our dreams. A presentation of problem scenarios and tasks with a virtual mentor as guide through a dramatic experience can enhance the learning process. Sometimes this is often what comes up naturally when we have particularly vivid dreams. Thomas (2011) presents research into the framework of a system for assisted learning activities through GBL with the goal of “automatically generating scaffolding to guide students in exploratory learning environments”.
An open collaboration of ideas through the use of a type of Delphi method would be most appropriate as these concepts are relatively young and expected to become heavily charged with strong opinions from several areas of study. There is no burning need to rush in where angels may fear to tread. The mind is a terrible thing to waste but an even more dreadful thing to destroy through ignorance and greed. More than ample time must be allotted to studying first the feasibility and ultimately the process of implementation of such an endeavor. By comparison, putting a man on the moon was simply child’s play. The human mind may really be the ultimate frontier to strive to explore.
Combining what will likely be discovered through future dream research with the rapidly developing fields of GBL and virtual worlds could provide both educational as well as economical benefits to a world where technology and wide spread understanding of the underlying knowledge a growing ever further apart. As usual, the unconventional aspects of this application will probably be an impediment to its progress as there is much to understand about how and why our brains function as they do before treading where we may not belong only to create the possibility for severe detrimental and even irreversible effects.
Gina R. Poe, P., Christine M. Walsh, P., & Theresa E. Bjorness, P. (2010). Both Duration and Timing of Sleep are Important to Memory Consolidation SLEEP, 33(10), 1277-1278. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2941411/pdf/aasm.33.10.1277.pdf
Hagewoud, R., Whitcomb, S. N., Heeringa, A. N., Robbert Havekes, P., Jaap M. Koolhaas, P., & Peter Meerlo, P. (2010). A Time for Learning and a Time for Sleep: The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Contextual Fear Conditioning at Different Times of the Day. SLEEP, 33(10), 1315-1322. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2941417/pdf/aasm.33.10.1315.pdf
THOMAS, J. M. (2011). Automated Scaffolding of Task-Based Learning in Non-Linear Game Environments. Unpublished Dissertation, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Walker, M. P., & Stickgold, R. (2010). Overnight Alchemy: Sleep-dependent Memory Evolution. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891532/pdf/nihms206932.pdf
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