Theories, research, and hippy baboons

As I have not done this for two days so I felt it was necessary to research it to see if I am just missing something...

SLEEP! Glorious, glorious sleep! T.T

Now, as we all know, sleep is what happens to most of us when we close our eyes for 8~17 hours and just kinda lay there... but what REALLY goes on? WHO CARES! I care about Stress and REM and Dreams. This will be a long one, so might edit it into two posts later.



To begin, I shall start with Rem. No, not R.E.M. but.. well.. technically I guess so. Rapid Eye Movement. Now, this fun little bit of our sleep is when there is a spike of mental activity, muscles not able to move, sexual excitement, and dreams (see below). Now, the part of this that interests me is the mental activity that occurs.

While in REM, your mind is very active. This is the stage where most (not all) dreams occur. Some theorize this is due to arbitrary synapses firing off messages and your cortex trying to figure out just what's going on. The interesting part of this is where these signals origionate. These signals are fired from the older (evolutionarily speaking) sections of the brain, heading to the "newer".* Why is this done? What would cause the animal brain to do this? It is seen in most (if not all) species as they sleep and enter this stage. My theory for this? At the end :)

DREAMS!

 

Now, this is where I think it starts to get interesting. Dreams are the cortex interpreting the ramblings of the brain as you sleep. There are many fun studies into dreams, my favorite by Robert Stickgold of Harvard University. He studies NREM (non-REM) dreams in humans. Through his work, he has proven that NREM dreams are how our mind does problem-solving. We relive the days experiences over and over, slowly changing and examining different minute details and learn from these changes. His study used a skiing game as test. Those who dreamed about snow or skiing in NREM sleep tended to do far better the next day when they played again.

Matthew Wilson (mit dude) studied rats in maze. He watched their brain activity as they went around the maze and matched it to activity in nrem/rem sleep.  During NREM, there were random bursts, mirroring past experiences. They would occur very swiftly going through the sequence, varying only slightly. During REM, the mice would replay memories without any increase in speed. These would be played out in real-time and sometimes lasted up to 5x longer.  These were reliving the days events with one or two major changes.

STRESSSTRESSSTRESS

Now, how does Stress play into this mix? Easy! When your body is under stress, your hippocampus doesn't function as well. Memories stop being written. Your body shuts down non-essential functions such as memory creation. (all nighters are example. stress = brain fart.) When this happens, you start to sleep less. Now, if stress reduces sleep and memory formation, does stress reduce the number, length, and usefulness of dreams? My theory is, while under high levels of stress, NREM and REM dreams are actually MORE powerful and MORE useful. Logically, if these dreams are a way of increasing survival rates through improving our ability to function in non-normal situations, wouldn't the utilization of these in a "do this or you DIE" situation be more important?

This can be supported by the fact that stress shuts down non-important life-sustaining features, while increasing those that allow for faster escape and handling of stressful situations. Blood pressure and heart rates increasing, reproductive urges, memory production, and sleep decreasing? These are basics. As the studies above show, NREM sleep allows for better handling of the day's conquests. REM increases our ability to cope with irregular and stressful situations we have not seen.

That makes my two theories. First theory: "Stress increases dream frequency". Second theory: "Stress increases the usefulness of dreams"

Sorry there are no baboons :( The stress studies I read were on baboon colonies, but I just didn't want to type that much at 3:15 am.

*If the use of evolution offends you, I don't care. Go back to Texas.