Just imagine a fruit tree that’s grown lots of new branches. It keeps connections that are useful or important and cuts those that we don’t need to keep. 10 There’s an interesting study that suggests that during REM sleep the brain sorts and filters connections that have been made in the brain during the day. Though the actual mechanisms involved are far more complex, this is a good way to think of memory consolidation. We can organise the ones we keep into folders, by date, content, colour… Whatever we choose. We keep the images that mean something to us but delete the ones that have a thumb over the lens or show something we needed in the moment, that’s no longer useful. You can think of memory consolidation as a bit like scrolling through the videos and photos on your phone. It’s thought that the two stages together are crucial for this process and that each is important for consolidation of certain types of memory.
This is known as memory consolidation and occurs in both deep sleep and REM.ĭeep sleep is what we call the third stage of NREM sleep and it occurs just before REM sleep.
5 It’s thought that emotions and emotional memories are processed during REM 9 as well as memories related to motor learning (movement). REM is also thought to be a stage of sleep that’s key for certain types of memories being formed and consolidated.
6 Levels remain consistent until later adulthood, when sleep can become more fragmented and REM sleep levels reduce. 5Īs humans develop and mature, the amount of REM sleep gets less and less and eventually levels out in early adulthood. As we’ve mentioned earlier, REM sleep was first identified in babies, and we now know that newborn mammals (including humans) spend most of their early lives in REM sleep. One hypothesis is that REM sleep is important for brain development. Many theories have been put forward and the fact that we experience most of our dreams during REM may be important. We don’t know with 100% certainty the exact reasons for this unique sleep stage. What this doesn’t tell us is why we experience this sleep stage and so we’ll explore that next. So we can sum up REM as a period of our sleep where our body barely moves, our brain is active and we’re highly likely to be dreaming. Apart from small muscle twitches the body loses all muscle tone, 4 essentially becoming temporarily paralysed, which may be to stop us acting out our dreams. Your heart rate and blood pressure also increase to levels similar to when you’re awake and breathing becomes faster and irregular. 3 We now also know that brain activity during REM sleep is similar to that seen when we’re awake. Later studies showed that specific patterns of brainwaves occur during REM sleep 2 and we experience long, narrative dreams during this sleep stage. It got its name after researchers noted that babies have periods of active sleep, where these rapid eye movements were seen, followed by periods of calm sleep. At its most basic level, REM sleep is a phase of sleep where the eyes move frequently and rapidly under the eyelids. Rapid eye movement: the clue’s in the name here. In this article we’re going to explore what’s going on in your body during REM sleep and why it’s important to ensure you’re getting enough of this sleep stage. We know that various processes are occurring in your body and brain during the different stages of your sleep. With each sleep cycle, the amount of time you spend in REM increases, so the latter half of the night is when you should be getting most of your REM sleep. Stages 1-3 are called non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and stage 4, the one we’re going to focus on in this article, is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.Įach sleep cycle lasts somewhere between 90-120 minutes and the cycles lengthen throughout the night. There are four sleep stages and you cycle through them several times a night. Sleep occurs in stages defined by what’s happening to your brainwaves. In reality, your brain remains active during sleep and your sleep itself is very structured. The brain powers down, plays some movies in the form of dreams and then, before you know it, the whole system powers back up in the morning.īut this is far from what’s actually happening. When you fall asleep, it may feel like the body goes into a kind of standby mode. what to do if you’re experiencing a sleep problem.what you can do to improve your REM sleep.You’ve no doubt heard of REM sleep but what does it actually mean and why’s it important to you? In this article we’re going to explore:
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