I wish Time didn't have it in their subscriber section, else I could quote it word-for-word... Instead I'm going to summarize as best I can. Though I do recommend either going to your newsstand to pick up the latest or going out to www.time.com and clicking the link on the right side (the sleep article, go figure) Anywho, heregoes. Time's article focuses on why we sleep and the effects it has on both our body and mind. The article says that researchers actually find that sleep does little for our bodies. "Is it to refresh the body? Not really. Researchers have yet to find any vital biological function that sleep restores. As far as anyone can tell, muscles don't need sleep, just intermittent periods of relaxation. The rest of the body chugs along seemingly unaware of whether the brain is asleep or awake." So why sleep? To refresh the mind of course! Background: There are two primary types of sleep, REM and non-REM. There are 4 stages of non-REM sleep. The 3rd and 4th stages are characterized by slow-wave non-REM sleep. "Children are champion slow-wave sleepers, which is why they sleep so soundly when being carried from the car to bed. Adults, on the other hand, get less and less slow-wave sleep as they age, which may be one of the reasons they wake up more often in the night." So what's the purpose of REM and non-REM sleep? REM sleep, according to Time's researchers, relates more to the memory used for patterns. This is also when most people remember their dreams upon waking. "What McNaughton's recordings have shown is that many of the same neurons that fire during the daytime -- say, when a rat is learning to navigate a maze -- are reactivated during the REM stage of sleep. 'Basically, the brain is reviewing its recently stored data,' he says. Eventually the brain consolidates those patterns into parmanent connections - or, as neuroscientists like to say, 'neurons that firetogether, wire together.' Interestingly, says McNaughton, that process appears to happen not just during sleep but during restful states throughout the day as well." What about slow-wave? "In a study published in July in Nature, Wisconsin's Tononi and others showed that a specific part of the brain that had been busy learning a new skill while awake needed much more slow-wave sleep in order to improve performance." It goes on to say that the experiment had people play a video game... the catch was that the video game would over or undercompensate the user's gestures. Half the group slept between sessions and the other half did not. "Tononi speculates that instead of strengthening neural connections responsible for a given task, as appears to happen during the day or in REM sleep, slow-wave sleep actually indiscriminately weakens the connections among all nerves." The idea being that it "clears memory" for use tomorrow. It's kind of like rebooting to clear your system memory... or better still, the computer reallocating data stored in the RAM so doom3 can use it to quickly tell the video card what to render when you turn back around to look at the room you just left. The slow-wave non-REM sleep eats away at all the data, so the oldest weakest data in the memory is destroyed so that new information can fill that space. (so what we really need is an upgrade!) The article generally suggests that memory and sleep are directly connected, but doesn't speak much of any other connections... Based on this information I'm starting my own research. I have remembered less than half a dozen dreams in as many years. I'm starting to play memory and pattern games to see if it affects my sleep. We'll see what happens! Today I started my new job where I learned a new task. How to pick orders. Learned where bins were and what order they were in. Predicting more REM. Also learned how to fill out a crap load of paperwork, predicting more slow-wave sleep (probably the 2nd part, but I have no way to measure that). See you guys in the morn.
Pretty interesting stuff.. And as for dreams, sounds like you, i cant remember the last time i remembered a dream :/ Maybe thats why i forget stuff, not enough REM sleep :/ Might start playing some RPG's again and trying to learn em inside out the way i know ff7 Proph.
Interesting post, thanks for that. Personally I remember dreams quite vividly (I dream in technicolour, complete with sensation, sound and smell) but only if I get a good night's sleep. Interestingly people "catch up" on REM sleep when they have been deprived of it, and I do remember more dreams when I have a lie-in after a number of days of not enough sleep. REM sleep can be found in most animals. REM sleep used to be equated to dream sleep but nowadays we realise that people dream outside of REM too. We drop into stage 3 sleep before REM, which is generally a good thing as that is when motor signals (coming from the brain) are blocked so that you don't act out your dreams physically. When this process screws up (which it occasionally does) you can either end up sleepwalking, or experience "sleep paralysis" in which you sort of wake up (actually go to stage 1) but can't move a muscle. Scary if you don't know what is going on, and this phenomenon has been the basis for the myth of "succubi"; sprites that sit on your chest at night and steal your life's breath and give you nightmares. With some minor surgery you can scupper this blocking process. This has been done in lab animals with the effect that they start acting out their dreams. As a result we now know that cats often dream of catching prey. There is Narcolepsy, in which people just drop off to sleep instantly, paradoxically when experiencing some form of arousal. In a rare variant of this you actually lapse straight into waking dream sleep --as a result a person can just sit there and all of a sudden have the most vivid hallucinatory experiences without an altered state of consciousness. The most freaky sleep disturbance (to my mind, anyway) is "Pavor nocturnis", or night frights. This occasionally happens in children but generally they grow out of it. It is rarer in adults. People who suffer this are peacefully asleep one moment, and the next they jump out of bed panicked and frightened out of their wits. They are often incoherent and do not know what scared them, but take some time to settle down again and go back to sleep. When they wake up in the morning, they have no recollection of the event. During sleep there is also an interesting shift in hormone production (melatonine, amongst others) and neurotransmitters and some speculation has been made on the brain needing to replenish such resources.
In a rare variant of this you actually lapse straight into waking dream sleep --as a result a person can just sit there and all of a sudden have the most vivid hallucinatory experiences without an altered state of consciousness. Funny, I get this when im sitting down in my business or whatever is boring for the day class, I'm usually playing some game but it's more than just daydreaming, I can see myself doing it infront of myself like a dream , but just wide awake, it's like another screen projecting an image in front of me, i do it daily too, always staring my friends ssay
My best friend actually gets these fairly frequently. She says it's the most terrifying thing she's ever known, and I believe it. She doesn't realize she's asleep most of the time, just that she can't move. And usually it starts in her room, just like she's awake... then someone will bang on the window or break in and start throwing things or jump on the floor and crawl toward the bed, where she can't see him, then jump up... The only way she's been able to deal with it is to try as hard as she can to scream so that when the chemicals are pushed out enough her mom can hear her and shake her awake. You have to wonder what posseses the mind to go back all of the sudden and not continue on with its proper sleep process...
