Sleep, Dreams and REM Sleep Behavior Disorder :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Sleep, Dreams and REM Sleep Behavior sickness The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep suggested that sleep was not, as it was thought to be, a dormant state but rather a mentally dynamic one. Your brain is, in fact, very busy in this state, almost to the level at which it is when a soulfulness is awake. Yet during this active stage in which most dreams occur, the movements of the rest of the body ar wholly stilled. To imagine this paralysis during dreams not occurring is a frightful image, since in numerous cases dreams are violent and active. When the neurotransmitters that control the movement of the body do not work properly the person develops REM sleep behavioral disturbance (RBD). While we are sleeping the sensory world is essentially revolving almost us without our knowledge. Our senses of hearing, touch, taste, sight, and smell no longer function as they do when we are awake. Except for the threshold for severally of these senses that each of us has musical composition we sleep, our inner systems are working essentially free of input from the after-school(prenominal) world. And yet people are able to have vivid dreams. The cerebral cortex can only pass into sleep mode with the help of the are of the brain tendered the thalamus. The thalamus is one of the two structures that make up the diencephalon, the lower area of the fore brain. Its main function in mammals is as the relay direct of sensory information its way to the cortical center. Specific regions of the thalamus, as rise up as different nuclei process different sensory information on its way to the cortex.In normal sleeping patterns a person usually passes through five phases of sleep, the fifth being REM. The sleeping human passes cyclically through these five phases throughout a nights rest. These phases can be defined in electrical activity of the brain much like the activity of the nubble is often defined. The technique of measuring the electrical activity of the b rain is call Electro-encephalogram, or EEG. When the electrical events of a persons brain are graphed on a electrical magnitude versus time axis the graph of a person who is in different stages of being asleep or awake come to the fore to have different levels of electrical activity occurring in the brain. (See (14))During the cycle of the phases each lasts for a different period of time during the time we are sleeping.