Many of us have experienced the effects of sleep deprivation: feeling tired and cranky, or finding it hard to concentrate.
Sleep is more important for our brains than you may realise.
Although it may appear you’re “switching off” when you fall asleep, the brain is far from inactive.
What we know from studying patterns of brain electrical activity is that while you sleep, your brain cycles through two main types of patterns: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and slow-wave sleep.
Slow-wave sleep, which occurs more at the beginning of the night, is characterised by slow rhythms of electrical activity across large numbers of brain cells (occurring one to four times per second).
As the night progresses, we have more and more REM sleep. During REM sleep we often have vivid dreams, and our brains show similar patterns of activity to when we are awake.
What are our brains doing while we sleep? Sleep serves many different functions.
One of these is to help us remember experiences we had during the day.
REM sleep is thought to be important for emotional memories (for example, memories involving fear) or procedural memory (such as how to ride a bike).
On the other hand, slow-wave sleep is thought to reflect the storing of so-called “declarative” memories that are the conscious record of your experiences and what you know (for example, what you had for breakfast).
We also know experiences are “replayed” in the brain during sleep - the memories of these experiences are like segments from a movie that can be rewound and played forward again.
Replay occurs in neurons in the hippocampus - a brain region important for memory - and has been best studied in rats learning to navigate a maze. After a navigation exercise, when the rat is resting, its brain replays the path it took through the maze.
Replay helps to strengthen the connections between brain cells, and is therefore thought to be important for consolidating memories.
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