10 mysterious things that happen to your body while you sleep – #6 is the reason why you always forget your dreams.

in #partiko6 years ago

Mysterious things that happen to your body while
you sleep: John Steinbeck once noted that “it is a
common experience that a problem difficult at night
is resolved in the morning after the committee of
sleep has worked on it.” When my head hits the
pillow and I can’t seem to turn off my thoughts, I
like to picture the committee gathering in a miniature
boardroom in my brain. I imagine tiny committee
members heatedly arguing over my dilemmas while I
snooze. What a relief to leave the toughest calls up
to somebody else.
Whether you’ve imagined it or not, you’ve
probably benefited from such a committee’s
hard work. While we doze, our brains and
bodies aren’t slacking off, they’re at work,
repairing us after the day’s battles and
refueling us for tomorrow’s slog—in more
ways than you likely realize.
There’s probably no teeny boardroom. But
here’s what’s actually going on while you’re
conked out:

  1. You aren’t sleeping deeply
    most of the time.
    Not all sleep was created equal: When you
    first drift off, you get only very light sleep,
    then progress deeper and deeper into
    dreamland. The sleep cycle starts in what’s
    called non–rapid eye movement or NREM
    stage 1 (the kind of sleep you might nab if
    you were the type to doze off during your
    college lectures; you know who you are).
    Then you move into a deeper NREM 2 and
    then to the deepest, NREM 3, also called
    slow-wave sleep. Finally, you land in rapid
    eye movement, or REM, sleep, the wild part
    of the ride when most of our dreams occur.
    The whole shebang usually takes
    somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, so
    on a typical night you’ll cycle through four
    or five times, waking up for just a sec
    As the night goes on, you spend less time in
    that deliciously deep stage 3 and more time
    in REM sleep, which explains why your
    alarm so often wakes you up in the middle
    of a totally bizarre dream, says Sigrid C.
    Veasey, MD, a neuroscientist and a
    professor of medicine at the University of
    Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and
    Circadian Neurobiology. But we don’t really
    know why REM periods get longer in the wee
    hours, says Daniel A. Barone, MD, an
    assistant professor of neurology at the Weill
    Cornell Medical College’s Center for Sleep
    Medicine. One theory, he says, is that REM
    sleep may somehow prepare you to get your
    butt out of bed.
  2. Your brain cleans house.
    Our brains are “on” throughout the night,
    especially in that dream-heavy REM sleep,
    Barone says, when they’re actually almost
    as active as they are when we’re wide
    awake.
    Among other things, they may be taking out
    the trash. That’s one of the more exciting
    new ideas about the purpose of sleep: A
    2013 study in mice found that waste
    removal systems in the brain are more
    active during sleep. Perhaps, the
    researchers theorized, we sleep to allow
    time to clear away toxic byproducts that
    would otherwise pile up and cause
    problems, like the trademark plaques of
    Alzheimer’s disease, Veasey says.
    Your brain’s also busy cementing new
    memories while you sleep. “We think the
    brain is processing the information we
    gained throughout the day and filtering out
    the information we don’t need, which may
    be one of the reasons we dream,” Barone
    says. The theory goes that maybe
    connections between brain cells are
    strengthened or weakened during sleep,
    depending on how much we used them
    during the day, he says. The important stuff
    gets reinforced while the factoids we just
    don’t need get trashed.

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