Abstract
Regions of the brain maintain their territory with continuous activity: if activity slows or stops (e.g., because of blindness), the territory tends to be taken over by its neighbors. A surprise in recent years has been the speed of takeover, which is measurable within an hour. These findings lead us to a new hypothesis on the origin of REM sleep. We hypothesize that the circuitry underlying REM sleep serves to amplify the visual system’s activity periodically throughout the night, allowing it to defend its territory against takeover from other senses. We find that measures of plasticity across 25 species of primates correlate positively with the proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We further find that plasticity and REM sleep increase in lockstep with evolutionary recency to humans. Finally, our hypothesis is consistent with the decrease in REM sleep and parallel decrease in neuroplasticity with aging.
Highlights
One of neuroscience’s unsolved mysteries is why we dream (Crick and Mitchison, 1983; Revonsuo, 2000; Hobson, 2009; Nir and Tononi, 2010)
Does the general plasticity of a species correlate with the percentage of sleep time they spend in rapid eye movement (REM)? We found a significant correlation with all three measures: time to locomotion [Figure 2A, r2 = 0.32, F(17) = 7.4, corrected p < 0.05], time to weaning [Figure 2B, r2 = 0.17, F(24) = 4.8, corrected p < 0.05], and time to adolescence [Figure 2C, r2 = 0.22, F(22) = 5.9, corrected p < 0.05]
Our data show that more plasticity correlates with more REM sleep
Summary
One of neuroscience’s unsolved mysteries is why we dream (Crick and Mitchison, 1983; Revonsuo, 2000; Hobson, 2009; Nir and Tononi, 2010). When human adults who recently lost their sight listen to sounds while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the REM Sleep Prevents Cortical Takeover auditory stimulation causes activity in the auditory cortex, and in the occipital cortex (Voss et al, 2008). Such findings illustrate that the brain undergoes changes rapidly when visual input stops
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