Noted: But recently, neuroscientists have started to explore other states of consciousness. In research published in the journal Nature in 2017, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin and colleagues looked at what happens when we dream. They measured brain activity as people slept, waking them up at regular intervals to ask whether they had been dreaming. Then the scientists looked at what the brain had been doing just before the sleepers woke up. When people reported dreaming, parts of the back of the brain were much more active—much like the brain areas that are active in babies. The prefrontal area, on the other hand, shuts down during sleep.
Office of Strategic Communication