The priority goal of such an important biological process as sleep is to free memory from unnecessary information, which is necessary for more effective memorization of important data, scientists from the United States of America believe.
Which, according to the TASS news agency, published two studies on sleep at once in the scientific journal Science.
One of the scientific papers focuses on the size and shape of synapses. The sections of transmission of nerve impulses between neurons, as found by employees of the University of Wisconsin, decrease by almost twenty percent during sleep - this is much stronger than scientists previously thought.
Thus, sleep creates all the necessary conditions for the brain to "erase" unnecessary data accumulated during the day.
The authors of the second study also focused on synapses, but studied their decrease in the context of specific proteins responsible for this process.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University performed a lot of experiments on genetically modified rodents in a special way and found out that there is a Homer1A protein in the brain, which does the basic work of truncating synapses.
Kolesnikov Andrey