The Science of Sleep: Uncovering the Brain's Reset Process

 Although sleep has always been mysterious, a recent study sheds new light on the topic. They suggest that sleep serves the primary purpose of resetting the brain's computational state to attain "criticality" based on their observation of brain activity in sleeping rats. By maintaining a balance between chaos and order in brain activity, criticality is a state that enhances thinking and information processing.

Important Details:

Sleep is essential for restoring the brain's ideal computational state, not merely for making us feel less sleepy.

The condition of criticality, which strikes a balance between chaos and order, optimizes the brain's ability to encode and interpret information.

This multidisciplinary study highlights the amazing complexity of the brain's neural networks by bridging the fields of physics and biology 

Hengen compared the brain to a biological computer. "While awake, memories and experiences gradually alter the code, dragging the overall system farther from its optimal condition. Restoring a condition of efficient computation is the main goal of sleep.

The paper's co-authors are graduate students in the Arts & Sciences Computational & Systems Biology department (Aidan Schneider), Yifan Xu, a graduate student in biology researching neurology, and physics professor Ralf Wesse

Brain waterfalls

The researchers observed the spiking of several neurons in the brains of young rats as they went about their regular sleeping and waking routines in order to verify their idea on the involvement of criticality in sleep.

According to Hengen, "you can follow these little cascades of activity through the neural network." According to him, these cascades—also known as neuronal avalanches—reflect the way information moves through the brain.

Avalanches of varying sizes and durations are possible during criticality. The system starts to favor only little or only large avalanches when it moves away from criticality. This is comparable to having limited word choice when writing a book.

WUSTL]

Like food and drink, sleep is an essential need. Keith Hengen, an associate biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, declared, "You'll die without it." However, what does sleep actually achieve? For many years, the most studies could conclude was that sleep lessens drowsiness, which is hardly a satisfactory justification for such a basic human need.