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

Sleep, Dreams and REM Sleep bearing Disorder The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) stay suggested that sleep was not, as it was thought to be, a dormant state but kind of a mentally dynamic one. Your sense is, in fact, very mobile in this state, almost to the level at which it is when a soul is circumspect. tho during this active stage in which most dreams occur, the movements of the rest of the body argon completely stilled. To imagine this paralysis during dreams not occurring is a frightful image, since in many cases dreams be violent and active. When the neurotransmitters that control the movement of the body do not work properly the person develops REM sleep behavioural disorder (RBD). While we are sleeping the sensory world is fundamentally revolving around 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 each of these senses that each of us has while we sle ep, our inner systems are working essentially free of foreplay from the outside world. And yet people are able to have graphical dreams. The cortex can only pass into sleep mode with the financial aid of the are of the brain called the thalamus. The thalamus is one of the two structures that make up the diencephalon, the lower part of the fore brain. Its main function in mammals is as the put across station of sensory discipline its way to the cortical center. Specific regions of the thalamus, as well 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 kind passes cyclically through these five phases throughout a nights rest. These phases can be delimitate in electrical action mechanism of the brain much like the activity of the heart is often defined. The technique of measuring the electrical activity of the brain 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 appear 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.