Every night, when a person has dreams, the brain completely turns off his ability to control his body, plunging the body into a state of paralysis so that dreams do not "break through" into reality, said Vladimir Kovalzon, a board member of the International Society of Somnologists, Doctor of Science, in an interview with RIA Novosti.
The scientist recalled that sleep consists of two phases - the phase of slow sleep, and rapid or paradoxical. It is during the last phase that a person sees dreams.
“These are two different states - slow sleep and fast sleep. Two fundamentally different states, differing from each other no less than sleep from wakefulness, said the scientist on the eve of World Sleep Day, which is celebrated on March 19 this year.
The first two phases of sleep were discovered with the advent of electroencephalography, a method of recording the electrical potentials of the brain. It turned out that the brain passes during sleep through several periods with different levels of activity, one of them - with relatively reduced activity - was called slow sleep, the second, during which the brain activity was almost the same as during wakefulness, was called fast phase.
REM sleep or paradoxical sleep differs in that a person's eyes move quickly, and the electroencephalogram becomes almost the same as that of the awakened one.
Sleeping three billion years
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For a long time, scientists could not say for sure why living organisms need sleep at all, in which they are defenseless against predators and other threats. You can regain strength simply by being at rest. It was hypothesized that during sleep, the human body gets rid of toxins, that during this period the brain's working capacity is restored. Experiments have shown that animals deprived of sleep inevitably died.
Covalson says that the genes that are responsible for sleep appeared at the dawn of evolution, in the first microorganisms, about 3.5 billion years ago.
“These are genes associated with rhythms, with biological clocks. This is the most important mechanism, apparently already at the first stages of evolution it was needed to adapt to the fact that there is a change of darkness and light,”the scientist said.
According to him, attempts to fight sleep, to increase wakefulness at the expense of sleep is "nonsense."
“Our nature is different. Three states - wakefulness, REM and Slow sleep, live inside us, and they must be realized. Fundamentally different states, the three worlds that are inside us, we live this way, we are so arranged. You can’t do anything with it,”said the agency's interlocutor.
The scientist said that the functions of slow wave sleep have now been established - at this time, complex processes are taking place, which ultimately lead to the restoration of special formations of the brain.
“There are some molecules there that“shift”when awake, they restore their potential during sleep so that they can work again later. This is an absolutely necessary element of our life, without it, neither we nor animals can exist,”said Kovalzon.
Why do dreams
However, the functions of REM sleep are still not fully understood. Although REM sleep at an early age is known to play a critical role in brain development, it is not clear why adults dream of dreams.
According to Kovalzon, an adult sleeps no more than an hour and a half per night REM sleep, but for a child it takes up to 90% of all sleep.
“It plays an important role, it has been shown that if experimental rats are deprived of REM sleep at an early age, the maturation of normal brain systems is disturbed - they cannot see normally, cannot feel normally, communicate. But why adults need this is still unclear,”said the agency's source.
He added that there are adults whose need for REM sleep is suppressed by antidepressants, and they do not experience problems and live for many years without any disturbances.
Nightly paralysis
Scientists managed to find out whether animals have dreams. Kovalson said that there is a group of neurons in the brain that turn off muscles during REM sleep and paralyze the entire body.
“During REM sleep with dreams, we have an active spinal cord block. It sends powerful inhibitory impulses, blocks our entire body, we cannot move, we are in a state of paralysis. This is done so that we cannot realize what we dream about,”the scientist explained.
If these paralyzing neurons are destroyed in a cat or a rat, then one can personally observe the dreams of animals. “The cat hunts for the invisible mouse, runs from the invisible dog. From this it was concluded that they had dreams, but we do not know what the situation is with other animals,”the agency's interlocutor said.
According to him, similar disorders in people who do not turn off the body during sleep can lead to tragic consequences. So, in the United States, an elderly spouse strangled his wife at night in a dream.
“He was brought to trial, but the somnologists made him a tomogram and proved that he had a disorder in the brain, he did it involuntarily,” said Kovalzon.
So "sleep paralysis" saves people, the scientist believes.