Word: sleepings
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What McNaughton's recordings have shown is that many of the same neurons that fire during the daytime--say, when a rat is learning to navigate a maze--are reactivated during the REM stage of sleep. "Basically, the brain is reviewing its recently stored data," he says. Eventually the brain consolidates those patterns into permanent connections--or, as neuroscientists like to say, "neurons that fire together, wire together." Interestingly, says McNaughton, that process appears to happen not just during sleep but during restful states throughout the day as well...
Better equipment HAS ALSO GIVEN researchers a new respect for what can be accomplished during slow-wave sleep. In a study published in July in Nature, Wisconsin's Tononi and others showed that a specific part of the brain that had been busy learning a new skill while awake needed much more slow-wave sleep in order to improve performance...
...cursor's motion, forcing them to adjust their movements. Half the group slept between sessions and the other half did not. Among the sleepers, the part of the brain that was learning to compensate for the bias while awake turned out to have the largest slow waves during sleep. "The bigger the slow waves were in that part of the brain, the better they performed the next day," Tononi says...
...good. But what does it mean? Tononi speculates that instead of strengthening neural connections responsible for a given task, as appears to happen during the day or in REM sleep, slow-wave sleep actually indiscriminately weakens the connections among all nerves. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it may simply be a matter of self-preservation. "Normally the brain takes up 20% of the energy of the entire body," Tononi explains. Most of that energy goes into sustaining the connecting points, or synapses, between neurons. The more you learn, the greater the number of synapses...
...neuroscientist to figure out where that leads. After a few days, the number of new synapses in the brain would require more energy than the body could possibly supply. So some of those connections must be weakened--and the best guess is that it happens during slow-wave sleep...