What Really Happens While We Sleep?

temp | Jan 11, 2010 | 0 comments

When you are sleeping, the EEG waves that your brain produces differ significantly from those that is produces during the day when your awake. While you’re awake during the day, your brain makes either very small and random waves called beta waves, or, when you relax and have your eyes closed, it makes alpha waves.

When you are sleeping, your brain makes bigger and slower waves, which are called delta and theta waves. The reason for this difference in brainwave activity is that when you are awake during the day, there are cells in your brain that fire individually. What the EEG records is the average of millions of firing nerve cells. As these nerve cells are firing, their negative and positive electrical charges will cancel each other out so the average is approximately zero. That’s why these waves are very tiny and the positive to negative fluctuations are very quick. While your sleeping, more of these nerve cells begin working together and, like a collection of hands clapping to the same beat, they discharge at the exact same time, which makes the brain waves much larger and slower.

There are two different kinds of sleep which are REM sleep and non-REM sleep. Non-rem sleep is usually referred to as “non-rem” and is written as NREM. NREM sleep is a sleep that you have that is void of any dreams. REM sleep is the sleep that you have when you’re dreaming.

Rapid eye movement is what REM stands for. This is because during this portion of your sleep time your eyes begin moving very rapidly. What this means essentially is that we tend to look around while we are dreaming. One of the ways you can tell whether a person is in REM sleep, without the use of any sleep gauging instruments, is to watch their closed eyes. If the person is dreaming the bulge of the eyeball underneath the eyelids that are closed will move very rapidly. If this is happening then the person is in REM sleep. If you do this little experiment you’ll want to watch for at least 30 to 40 seconds, because sometimes there will be pauses between individual groups of eye movements.

What is interesting about this is that the brain does not seem to recognize that we’re dreaming, but will still give muscle commands to carry out actions that we are dreaming about. Luckily for us, just before the dreaming begins, a nucleus of nerve cells that are deep within our brain stem relaxes all of our muscles so deeply, that they are essentially paralyzed. During this dreaming stage, the commands our brain sent out to move these muscles result only in tiny bits of movement, and this allows us to sleep while were dreaming. You may have even seen twitches like these in smaller animals like cats are dogs while they are dreaming.

In sleep research done on animals researchers found it was possible to block out the muscle inhibiting nucleus that prevents the muscle from moving during REM sleep. The animals during this research acted out the dreams they were having. Although their eyes were closed and they were asleep, they would crouch, scratch, and fight. There’s a similar phenomenon among people, usually around middle age, where the nerve cells that inhibit the muscle movements are not properly functioning. This may result in violence for us or actions during the drain. They may bang on the pillow, throw themselves out of their bed, and occasionally cause damage to themselves. This particular disorder is called the REM behavior disorder and it can be treated.

Visit Memory Foam World where you can learn all about memory foam as well as cheap memory foam mattress and a cheap foam mattress.