YOUR BRAIN WORKS WHILE YOU SLEEP

You really do need your beauty sleep. But according to an article in Scientific American Mind titled “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work” maybe the saying should be changed to you need your thinking sleep.

The article explores just what our brain is doing while we sleep. The original belief until the 1950’s was that the brain was shut down while we sleep. This has turned out to be completely false. In the mid 1950’s physiologist Eugene Aserinsky discovered that our sleep follows a 90 minute cycle in and out of the Rapid Eye Movement, or REM stage.

In 1994 there was an experiment conducted involving amounts of REM and learning a difficult task one night, and then trying it again the next morning. The subjects had to rapidly discriminate between objects they saw. After a night of good REM sleep, the subjects all showed noticeable improvements, however when the subjects were deprived of REM the improvements disappeared. “The fact that performance actually rose overnight negated the idea of passive protection”. REM was described as a permissive sleep where change could happen.

When the same experiment was conducted in 2000 it became apparent that sleep was in fact necessary for that improvement to take place. However the subjects had to get at least 6 hours of sleep for improvements to be noticed and it was also discovered that slow wave sleep was in fact involved in the cognitive improvements noticed.

In 2006 the co-authors then did another experiment to answer the question of how we process our daily memories. They concluded that as we sleep our brains may be rifling through the memories from the day, and then dissecting the most important parts to keep. They found that their subjects lost 10% of their memories from the day before whether or not they got the magic number of 6 hours of sleep. However, they found that in the subjects who got a good night of sleep their memory for emotionally evocative objects actually rose by 15%. One would assume that after a period of time these memories would be all that is left from a specific set of events. It was already known that people culled their memories in this manner, but now it appears that sleep plays a major role in this culling.

As more and more studies about sleep report similar findings to those of the co-authors of this article it is becoming increasingly clear that our brain is anything but inactive during sleep. It is hypothesized that we have evolved to use our sleep pattern that we developed thousands of years ago of sleeping at night and hunting during the day to our advantage in a mental capacity. “The brain evolved to use light and darkness wisely: acquire information by day; process it by night.”

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