Through its therapeutic work at night, REM sleep performed the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind from the information-rich fruit. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried. Indeed, I argued that if REM sleep did not perform this operation, we’d all be left with a state of chronic anxiety in our autobiographical memory networks; every time we recalled something salient, not only would we recall the details of the memory, but we would relive the same stressful
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