A lot of things have happened in my private life recently that I thought we could review tonight
Walker and his team tried to measure how sleeping can help us to process bad experiences. (…)
The results show that during the REM sleep the part of the brain that processes the emotions (the amygdala) decreased its activity, so that the prefrontal cortex, linked to rational actions, probably weakened the impact of a bad experience. Also, they noticed a drop in the levels of brain chemicals that are linked to stress.
“Somewhere between the initial event and the later point of recollecting, the brain has performed an elegant trick of divorcing emotions from memory, so it’s no longer itself emotional,” Walker said.
