• Question: What do tigers dream of, when they take a little tiger snooze?

    Asked by predator to Anna, Craig, Richard, Shane, Sue on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Sue Carney

      Sue Carney answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know the answer to this question! Didn’t someone with a hangover suggest tigers might dream about mauling zebras & something about Halle Berry..? 😉 😉

      To actually find out would be pretty difficult I think. It would certainly involve designing an experiment, but I think that would be tricky to do and dangerous, because tigers are wild animals. Maybe it would be possible to measure a tiger’s brain activity whilst awake and doing certain things, then compare that to their brain activity when they’re dreaming. You’d probably have to use more than one tiger because how would you know that all tigers dream of the same things? I’d want to know what the benefits might be, both to tigers and to people, before deciding whether it was worth carrying out this experiment though, and I’d definitely want to know that there was no risk to any of the tigers involved.

    • Photo: Richard Case

      Richard Case answered on 12 Jun 2011:

      Not knowing the age of the person who is asking… or what the motive is, I am opting for a number of answers:

      I am sure that Tigger from Winnie the Pooh dreams about Bouncing!! 🙂

      My friend Adrian supports Hull Football Club (The Tigers), so as Adrian is a keen golfer, I am sure he reams about golf regularly.

      Now a more “scientific” answer: …. I would think all animals have dreams to prepare themselves for whatever nature requires and to help secure the long term future of the species…. so the dreams may include hunting, fighting or procreating.

    • Photo: Anna Williams

      Anna Williams answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi Predator,
      What an interesting question! Well, I’m not actually sure exactly what they dream of, but they are very likely to dream. Most mammals dream as a way of rehearsing what they do in real life…so it is likely that a tiger would dream about stalking and catching prey in the jungle. My dog definitely dreams about chasing rabbits – you can tell by his twitching paws.

    • Photo: Craig McKenzie

      Craig McKenzie answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      now there’s a question to start us off

      – and I’m liking the approach my fellow scientists are taking.

      …. a starting point would be to think about the kind of things you dream of and how it relates to how you are feeling whilst you are awake or before you sleep – what is on your mind are you relaxed or worried about something?. You can then look at what things a tiger is likely to be thinking about in their lives by looking at their behaviour and their environment. You should always be careful about assuming that tigers dream for the same reasons that we do – the only way we could really find out is to work out how to communicate with them in enough detail – now there’s a project……

      I’m liking Sue’s plan for carrying out the experiments, although i think it is quite nice not to know exactly what a tiger is dreaming about – they deserve a little privacy after chasing after their dinner in the countryside all day without being poked and prodded by scientists!

    • Photo: Shane Pennington-Cooper

      Shane Pennington-Cooper answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      If this is simply a quote from The Hangover then I must admit that this was a very funny film, I have yet to watch the second one however I have been told that it is much better than the first one.

      Anyway if this is a real science question then I better start talking about the sciency stuff.

      As Sue mentioned in her post we would have to carry out an experiment on the electrical impulses of the tiger’s brain. These electrical impulses would show up as peaks on a polysomnograph or PSG for short (a PSG is very similar to an electrocaridogram which measures heart activity). These peaks would differ in height and steepness depending on the level of sleep (_/\_ a poor example of a peak and baseline using text). Unfortunately these spikes (a steep peak) and peaks can only tell the expert that the mammal is either distressed or happy. For us to know exactly what a tiger would be dreaming we would have to relate these spikes with images which is very unlikely at the moment. One as Sue said it would be dangerous do carry out a tiger dream study and two the technology is not yet available to translate electrical signals to pictures. All I do know is the reason why we dream is because the brain trys to make sense out of all the short term information we have gathered in the day and translates this into long term memory. The reason why we have nightmares or ‘night terrors’ is because our brain is working out a plan for when we face a specific threat in our lives, the brain can play out different scenarios in the comfort of our bed a bit like a test chamber or virtual reality. I am pretty sure all mammals dream like this to. So tigers can dream about anything they have seen or heard in the day and they have nightmares to prepare themselves incase of a threat.

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