• Question: I really love your work, I have a question. If you could do anything to improve your work, what would it be and why? Also, what are your plans for the future in your field of science?

    Asked by anon-188279 to Alex on 15 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 15 Nov 2018:


      Hi Dr A, thank you for saying that, it is very kind. If I could invent anything that would help my work it would be a device to accurately record dreams. As a scientist I need things to measure, and dreams are a real headache in this regard! Currently, to measure a dream we have to wake people up, and this naturally disrupts sleep. People are also notoriously inaccurate at reporting dreams and may suffer from rapid memory loss or worry that we are testing their intelligence or creativity and ’embellish’ what they were dreaming about (i.e. make stuff up). I could go on, but the fact that dreams are so hard to study has made it very difficult to draw any proper conclusions about them. Developing some kind of technology to literally record dreams would be amazing, and it would probably also have lots of other applications (such as helping paralyzed people communicate).
      My future plans at the moment with respect to sleep research is to help run a study into something called the ‘weapon focus effect’. Basically when people get mugged they understandably tend to focus on the weapon and not the criminal (which causes issues for reporting crimes). I have a hunch sleep might make this worse, as it sleep has previously been shown to promote the memory of negative items (such as a car crash) at the expense of background details (memory of the street). I am trying to run a study with some of my students that uses video footage of people carrying either a weapon or a phone, and seeing how sleep influences memory of the assailant (criminal) in this footage. If my hunch is right it might mean police should try and interview eyewitnesses before they have some sleep, not after.

Comments