• Question: What happens to our brains when we sleep?

    Asked by thebeasts on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      thebeasties. Good question. for reasons I don’t undertand (probs to do with a condition called sleep apnoea) sleep medicine is part of respiratory medicine. So i ought to know some of this but I’m afraid I’m a wee bit sketchy.

      The answer I think is that they keep ticking over. The key phrases are REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM sleep. You can dream in both but are more likely to do so in REM. In REM your muscles are paralysed (weird isn’t it). But people sleep-walk, sleep talk, have sleep sex, sleep eat, sleep fight and kill all of which requires brain activity of the usual sort. The argument is about consciousness and I guess you have to say that people do these things unconsciously ( their consciousness activator is switched off).

      Is that helpful? I can tell you if you watch a polysomnogram (sleep brain trace) it’s more interesting than you’d imagine….

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