1) We do not sleep to rest — The brain doesn’t need rest because our brains are active even while we sleep. Our body doesn’t need restoration either because you sleep whether you spent the day running, or whether you spent the day sitting on the couch watching TV. People with no limbs who use no energy sleep too.
2) The claim that people never dream or go without dreaming for long periods of time —it is all a matter of timing, and we only recall our dreams if we wake during the Rapid Eye Movement stage (REM). We lose about 95% of all our dreams.
3) We are not in a coma when we sleep, we just don’t have the ability to interact with our environment, but we can still process some information. It’s because of this that sometimes we incorporate reality into our dreams. Like having to go to the bathroom really bad, or hearing a noise similar to your alarm clock.
4) Sleepwalking is not the acting out of dreams— dreams occur during our REM state, in which all our muscles are paralyzed. Sleepwalking occurs in stage four, and it is not dangerous to wake sleepwalkers up, it’s just difficult and they’ll just be really confused.
5) Sleep talking does not report the content of dreams — some sleep talkers can respond to limited input. But we can’t learn Spanish using audio-tapes, cortical activity during slow-wave sleep is too diminished for that. Darn. lol
haha, I guess Stephenie Meyer should check her facts before she goes writing about girls talking in their sleep.
Other random facts:
1) It is possible to predict dream motion by looking at the fMRI scan of the motor cortex of a person. If someone is walking in their dream, the neurons that fire for real-life leg and torso movement are activated. This sheds light on the common dream theme of the inability to move, as, for instance, the powerlessness to run away from a threat or trying to scream but producing no sound. haha, I've had that dream many times.
2)Studies show that those who study material and then take a one hour nap before the test do significantly better than those who studied and did not sleep. Part of why we sleep is so our brains can compress data and store memories. Facts and information store more efficiently when you sleep more!
Hurray for sleep!
Anyways, I hope this was as interesting for you to read as it was for me to learn.
sleep and dreams are so fascinating to me.
ReplyDeletei remember one time i checked out literally twelve books from the library on sleep.
so interesting.
and for the record, i remember my dreams every single night. :)
lol yea i know, i could talk about lucid dreaming right now as well.
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