Write your abstract here. PART II - The Ultimate Mystery: What Do Our Brains Do While
Sleeping ?
In series of experiments that he began in the early 1990s, Dr. Carlyle
Smith of Trent University in Canada has found a strong association
between the amount of Stage 2
Sleep a person gets and the improvement
in learning motor tasks. Mastering a guitar, a hockey stick or a
keyboard are all motor tasks.
Musicians, among others, have sensed this instinctually. A piece that
is difficult during and evening practice will often flow better in the
morning for some reason. But only in recent years has the science
caught up and given their hunch some scientific backing. For instance, Dr. Smith said that people typically got most of their
Stage 2 sleep in the second half of the night. “The implication of this
is that if you are preparing for a performance, a music recital, say,
or skating performance, it’s better to stay up late than get up really
early,” he said in an interview. “These coaches that have athletes or
other performers up at 5 o’clock in the morning, I think that’s just
crazy.” So here’s the big question: is something going on with
memory processing that is unique to sleep ? Subimal Datta, a neuroscientist across the river at Boston University
School of Medicine, says yes. In his studies of animals, he has
documented that during sleep the
Brain is awash in a
chemical bath
unlike any during waking. Levels of inhibitory transmitters increase
sharply, and levels of many activating messengers drop, or shut down
entirely. Even before REM is detectable, Dr. Datta said, a small pocket of cells
in the brainstem spurs a surge in glutamate — an activating chemical —
which leads to protein synthesis and other changes that support
long-term memory storage. “During waking we have a thousand things happening at once, the library
is filling up, and we can’t possibly process it all,” Dr. Datta said.
While awake the brain is also gathering lots of valuable information
subconsciously, he said, without the person’s ever being aware of it. “It’s during sleep that we have this special condition to clear away
this overload, and these REM processes then help store what’s
important,” Dr. Datta said. Dreams still defy scientific understanding but they also appear to play
a role in the evolving theory of sleep-dependent learning. Some scientists argue that during REM sleep, or dream mode, the brain
will mix, match and make
sense of the memory traces it has preserved,
as it looks for connections that help make sense of life. It was during sleep that the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev was
reported to have developed the periodic table of the elements.
Friedrich August Kekule, a 19th-century chemist, said he worked out the
chemical structure of the benzine ring after dreaming of a snake biting
its tail. Athletes like Jack Nicklaus, have also mentioned insights
discovered while sleeping. “It does make sense these insights come during REM,” Dr. Walker said.
“I mean, what better time to play out all these different scenarios and
solutions and ideas than in dreams, where there are no consequences ?” The problem, he says, is how to study it. Few of us would venture to
say we know what goes on in our heads while sleeping, but to quantify
and generalize such an elusive state has been quite a journey. Galaxy News Reported October 24th, 2007.
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