Halloween may be over, but the fact remains: fear is hard-wired into the human experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a recent article exploring the science of fear, the Spokesman-Review<\/em> featured Professor Chris Davis, PhD, a faculty member in the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine’s Department of Translational Medicine and Physiology and the Sleep and Performance Research Center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis explained that nightmares tend to occur during during rapid eye movement sleep (REM), when the \u201cfear center\u201d in the brain’s limbic system tends to be most active but the more reasonable the frontal lobe is less active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe emotion-generating and memory center regions are pretty active, and the logical reasoning areas of our brain kind of go offline,\u201d Davis told the newspaper. \u201cSo, essentially, that sets the stage for tense storylike dreams with strong emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also discussed growing interest in lucid dreaming as a treatment for nightmares, such as nightmares that occur in PTSD.<\/p>\n\n\n