It’s a year! After a year of reflecting, dreaming, and expressing gratitude to teachers in the Covid 19 Pandemic, we’ve come to an impasse on making the most of our pandemic lives. So what’s the next step? Meeting goals doesn’t just come with designing your life. It comes with a strategic, brain-aware way to approach accomplishment. Challenging Yourself Neuroscientists have been interested in goal setting and how to challenge the experience mentally. Students making academic goals can also learn something from neuroscience. The neuroscience community suggests that even HAVING goals is helpful to direct the way our brain forms connections and thoughts. More goals = more connections. A new framework suggests that making changes in behavior requires a shift in two axes: level of skill, knowledge, the ability needed for action; and status of motivation. An example of this behavior on the high ends of motivation and level of skill and familiarity is navigating a new city for the first time. This action is HIGH on both axes because it shows an exciting challenge necessary to undergo if one is traveling. There is motivation and dexterity. Considering Executive Function So, how would you use this new framework? Well, thinking about the brain’s executive function (how various parts of our brains work together to complete a task that requires attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and planning) provides insight. Executive function rests on taking novel experiences and information and responding to them to normalize a response. This activity is referred to as “habit formation.” Suppose the brain is a limited resource with constant energetic needs. In that case, executive function is also limited in its ability to perform tasks and choose which ones are the most important to standardize and form a habit. What does this suggest? Practice! Practice makes more than perfect. Perhaps another obvious solution, but a plenty important one. Using our brains to actively work on a goal and doing it over and over simply by quantity is a neuroscientifically suggested method of achieving your goals.
How Your Crazy Covid Dreams Might be Helping You Learn As winter approaches, the days are shorter and nights longer. Besides spending time in self-reflection, now’s the time for plenty of naps and sleeping. As a result, you might find yourself having stranger dreams than usual. Some studies now suggest that such dreams may result in memory consolidation. They can also result in an ability to understand complicated experiences digested during the day. Lots of strange dreams during Covid Are you having lots of strange dreams during the Covid pandemic? When looking at a sample of 1091 Italian participants and asking for their self-reported experiences in slumber, one study found that “dream frequency, emotional load, vividness, bizarreness and length” were all rated higher during the pandemic when compared to a pre-lockdown period. You are not alone. Additionally, individuals noted a higher increase in “negative emotions” when assessing their dreams. Finally, predisposition to some factors, such as sensitivity to depression, were predictive of such “strange” dreams. Dreaming to learn Tufts University neuroscientist Erik Hoel suggests that these dreams may be a process our brains go through to learn. His reasoning? Well, we know that dreams are amalgamations of experiences that we have throughout our days. Dr. Hoel believes that due to the monotonous nature of our lockdown experiences, our brains may be trying to create novelty in our subconscious minds to help us glean insights from what would otherwise be routine experiences. Therefore, these strange dreams may serve as intelligence in our working memory to teach us from new experiences, whether real or imagined at night. Practice makes perfect While these researchers try to make sense of the bizarre and unanticipated externalities of a global pandemic, many different hypotheses are coming into play when analyzing dreams. Another assumption is that dreams are ways our brains allow us to practice responding to real-life situations that have not yet occurred. Thus, the more you can “practice” in your dream, the more you can be prepared to perform in real life. What’s weird? Despite there not being one consensus when it comes to why we are experiencing dreams that are “strange” during Covid, there is a lot of interest in the field of understanding such experiences. As a result, the concept of “overfitting” is an idea that has permeated circles of scientists asking why we dream the way we do. This concept argues that dreams are weird because if they weren’t, we’d never be able to get new insights into our daily lives. Dreaming strange dreams might be normal, just as much as learning, whether you expect it or not, can be. Either way, your crazy Covid dreams might be helping you learn!
