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Grade 9：Online Assembly(2)

March 31, 2020

On March 27, Sophie from class 9(11) shared information with her grade in the online Assembly. She talked about dreams and how many people have made scientific discoveries or received inspiration from their dreams. What happens to the brain when people dream? Through research literature, Sophie found that during dreaming, the whole brain is very active from the brain stem to the cortex; and that most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. But why do people accept crazy and illogical things that happen in dreams? The literature points out that the least active part of the brain when we’re dreaming are some parts of the frontal lobes, which may explain why we can be so uncritical during dreams.

Sophie also cited Srinivasa Ramanujan as a dream researcher. Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. His contributions included solutions to mathematical problems that were considered unsolvable. According to Ramanujan, inspiration and insight for his work came to him in his dreams. A Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, would appear and present mathematical formulae that he would verify after waking. Such dreams often repeated themselves and the connection with the dream world as a source for his work was constant throughout his life. Actually, there are many other scientific discoveries and inventions that came to us through dreams. Like the double helix structure of DNA, or the sewing machine.

Finally, Sophie mentioned that although their ideas may have come from dreams, they are still created by our minds. So, we still need to rely on hard work while being mindful of the power of human brain.

(Writtern by Sophie Li Pictures bySophie Li Supervised by Menglei Wang)