Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to another episode. Today we're going to dive into

the mysteries and the wonders of the dreaming brain. If you've been a listener to this podcast before,

you'll know that we've journeyed through the fascinating

mechanisms of how your brain conjures up these things called dreams, and we've even

unraveled some of the origins of these nighttime narratives. But today, we're going to cover two distinct things. First, we're going to ask the

question, do dreams themselves above and beyond the stage of sleep that they principally come from,

which is REM sleep, do dreams and the content of our dreams have any real purpose? Or are they just

mental fireworks, meaning that they are beautiful, they are fleeting, but they don't really

result in any meaningful change to the human being themselves. Wow, that was rather harsh on fireworks,

perhaps, but anyway, that's the first thing we're going to discuss. Does the content of what

you dream actually make a difference? The second is a fascinating new study. It's sort of the hot

off the press, the latest and greatest that I try to keep you up to date with, which suggests

that REM sleep, and perhaps again, the act of dreaming itself, can even help us eradicate unwanted memories.

And this, in neuroscience, is something that we call memory extinction.

And you can think of it almost, if you've seen that movie, it's, oh, I always blank on the name,

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

That idea that you've got these sort of painful or difficult memories that you really

wish that you could just clear out and not have to recollect or remember because they are

just so painful.

And there was this sort of technology that they developed with a brain scanner and they

go in there and they zap these scanner and they go in there and

they zap these memories and they're gone forever and brings up all of these wonderful

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