Neuroscientists closer to understanding the mysteries of sleep

Like Islands sticking out of the smooth surface of the ocean, dreams pierce our sleep incoherent episodes of consciousness. How come these fragments of thoughts in sleep the brain — this question has long concerned scientists and philosophers. Tens of years, scientists have linked dreams with the phase of rapid eye movement (REM), when resting the brain, paradoxically, produces high-frequency brain waves that are very similar to those born during waking hours.

And yet the dreams we see not just during REM. Some strange studies have found signs of dreaming during non-REM sleep, when the brain reigns of slow-wave activity — the opposite of anxious, active, conscious state. And now, thanks to the study, which was published in Nature Neurosciece, we seem to find an answer to a tricky dilemma.

Carefully tracking the brain waves of sleeping volunteers, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin have pinpointed the local "hot spot" in the brain that activates when we sleep, regardless of the phase of sleep in which the person is located.

"are you sure You can define a caption for the sleeping brain," says study author Dr. Francesca Siclari.

Moreover, using the algorithm developed on the basis of its observations, the team was able to accurately predict when a person is sleeping, 90% accuracy, and yet...

...and here the most interesting...

...about to parse the content of dreams.

"We found that the sleeping brain and the waking brain can be a lot more similar than it seemed," says Siclari.

This study not only opens the door for simulations of dreams for the treatment of PTSD, but also could help scientists find a lead on the mystery of consciousness.

"the Importance of this article is simply astounding," says Dr. mark Blagrove from Swansea University in Wales, who did not participate in the study.

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the Anatomy of sleep

In the course of a full night's sleep cycle we go through different stages characterized by distinctive patterns of brain work. Scientists often use EEG to accurately capture each stage of sleep that involves placing 256 electrodes on the human skull and the subsequent tracking of the number and size of brain waves at different frequencies.

When we doze off, our brains show low-frequency activity, which runs across the surface. These waves indicate that the neurons are in a "calm state" and not able to communicate between areas of the brain — therefore, low-frequency activity often associated with loss of consciousness.

These slow oscillations of non-REM sleep eventually transferred to high-frequency activity, signaling the transition into a phase of rapid eye movement. This sleep phase is often associated with vivid dreams and this relationship is so deeply rooted in the sleep study, that phase of the REM without dreams or dreams in the phase of non-REM is often ignored as oddities.

It Turns out that these strange cases hinted to us that our current understanding of the neurobiology of sleep — is not complete.

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Ship of dreams

To review these paradoxical results, Siclari and her team tracked the brain activity of 32 volunteers using EEG and woke them during the night at random intervals. Then the scientists asked the sleepy participants, whether they dreamt something, and if so, what dreamed of. In total this has happened 200 times a night.

But instead of to see the global displacement activity, associated with sleep, the researchers were surprised to find the area of the brain at the back of the head, which dynamically shifted their activity on the basis of dreams.

The Dreams were associated with a decrease in low-frequency waves in the "hot zone" and with the increase of high-frequency waves that reflect a high rate of neural activations, and brain activity. It was a kind of awakening, independent of sleep stage or overall activity of the brain.

"Everything indicates that you need a very limited, well-defined activation of the brain to generate conscious experience," says Siclari. "Until now we thought that for the generation of conscious experience must be activated large areas of the brain."

What the hot zone is connected to action during sleep, has a specific meaning. Previous work has shown that stimulating these areas of the brain by means of an electrode may cause a feeling of being "in a parallel world." This hot zone also contains areas, which integrate sensory information to build a virtual model of the world around us. This kind of modeling lays the Foundation for many of our imaginary worlds, and that the hot zone is well suited for this business," say the authors.

If the active hot zone in fact constitutes the "signature sleep", its activity must be able to tell whether a person is asleep in exactly the specified time. The authors have created an algorithm based on their results and checked its accuracy on a separate group of people.

"We woke them up whenever the algorithm told us that they sleep, only 84 times," the researchers write.

In total this algorithm showed 90% accuracy of the analysis of the presence of sleep — even in cases when participants did not remember the contents of their dreams, but was sure they were asleep.

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Reading dreams

Since the hot zone contains areas that process visual information, researchers have wondered whether it is possible to access the content of the dreams of subjects using EEG readings.

Dreams can be extremely real, with the unfolding events, or completely abstract, free fantasy, scientists say. Persons, places, movements and speech are all normal components of dreams that can be processed easily identify the regions of the hot zone, so the researchers decided to focus on these aspects.

Remarkably, the volunteers who told me that said in your dreams, demonstrated activity in areas of the brain responsible for speech; and those who dreamed of people demonstrated activity in the centres of recognition.

"It suggests that dreams use the same areas of the brain, and conscious experiences during wakefulness, for a particular content," says Siclari, noting that the earlier studies could only show it on the example of the "zone of twilight", the transition between sleep and wakefulness.

Finally, I have been interested in what happens when we sleep, but do not remember specific details. It turned out that this strange state is a separate EEG-signature: memorizing parts of sleep was associated with a burst of high frequency activity in frontal areas of the brain.

Give birth to interesting questions, such as whether the frontal lobes of the brain for lucid dreaming, a special state where people realize that sleep and can change the contents of the dream.

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Waking life

Scientists can not yet explain what activates the hot zone during sleep, but the answers can tell us whether sleep is a biological purpose, for example, the processing of memories in large concepts about the world.

The Mapping of the activity of the sleeping brain may also lead to ways to directly manipulate our dreams, using non-invasive treatments such as transcranial stimulation current. Introduction to the sleep state can help people with insomnia, and destruction disturbing of sleep may help patients with PTSD to sleep better.

Dr. Julo Tononi, the study's lead author, believes that the implications of this study go far beyond sleep.

"We were able to compare the behavior of the sleeping brain in comparison with waking. This study can be a valuable model for the study of consciousness," he says.

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