Hi everyone,
I heard this interview today on TV. I think there are some interesting points to ponder in it. I found Fred's comparison of REM sleep to the memory function of the hardrive of a computer especially interesting. The complete transcript is available at
www.itiswritten.comHere is an excerpt.
tt
SHAWN: OK, let's look at sleep itself. I don't know a lot about sleep. I have struggled with sleep all my life and I long to understand a little more about it, as do many people watching today. I have heard that sleep comes in cycles. It's not that you drop to sleep, wake up in the morning, and that's it. A lot happens during the course of the night. Quickly, what are those cycles? How does it break down? And then maybe we'll go back and look at each stage of sleep.
FRED: Well, typically, sleep is divided into five stages. We then commonly categorize those stages into two general groups. There is the slow-wave sleep, which is stage three and four of the five-stage scale. And then there is REM sleep, which is known as rapid eye movement sleep. Named thus because during that phase of sleep, people's eyes often, while their lids are closed, their eyes go back and forth very rapidly, appearing as if they were awake and looking at things. But they are sound asleep when they're doing that.
The benefits of both of these phases, or categories, of sleep, are very significant, and many things take place that benefit us from a health standpoint.
SHAWN: Then let's break it down a little bit. Explain some of the phases of sleep and what happens during those phases. What benefit are they to me? For example, what happens during slow-wave sleep?
FRED: During slow-wave sleep, two primary things take place. The first is that this is when restoration and growth of tissue take place. This is when the repair to the "damage of living" during the day occurs. The other thing is that during this phase, immunity is strengthened and repaired. So people who don't get adequate slow-wave sleep should expect to have more colds, flu and infections.
SHAWN: What about REM sleep? You were talking about the eyes moving quickly. Why do we do that?
FRED: During the rapid eye movement phase of sleep a person will look like they are awake and yet they have every other sign of being sound asleep. They probably aren't moving their hands or legs. They are sound asleep, but if you look at their eyes, you notice there is quite a bit of movement. During this phase of sleep, many interesting things take place in the brain.
For instance, this is where the things we have learned during the day are shifted from the short-term memory area to the long-term memory area. This is especially significant for students. There is some interesting research being done on senior high school students and college students that shows that if they get at least two hours of good sleep before midnight, they will retain their newly learned information longer.
SHAWN: Really?
RED: Yes.
SHAWN: All those nights I stayed up through the night cramming for tests weren't really helping me that much?
FRED: You may get by, but it isn't the best way of doing it.
SHAWN: So is this kind of like a filing stage of sleep? We take all the information from the last day or two and our brain puts it in the appropriate place? Is that a fair analogy?
FRED: It's kind of like a computer. When you sit and type, what you have typed goes into the RAM memory, and until you save it on a disk, well, if the power fails, what you've typed is gone. And all of us who have used computers have had that unhappy discovery. So we save frequently, or we set our computer programs to save automatically so we lose the minimum should there be a power failure.
When we learn new information, it goes into short-term memory, but then it has to be transferred into a long-term memory area. And during this transfer, similar bits of information, if you will, are stored in areas where the same type of information has been stored. And that occurs during REM sleep. And so REM is a very important aspect of sleep for learning and memory.
SHAWN: Just out of curiosity, is this when we're dreaming?
FRED: REM sleep is when we are dreaming.
SHAWN: I've often wondered, is REM sleep a filing process? Are we taking information and sorting it away?
FRED: It's actually a renewal process. And the reason that dreams often are so nonsensical is that memories need to be refreshed periodically, and this automatic process takes place during REM sleep in which memories from various times and places that we have in our mind are refreshed.
SHAWN: That is very interesting, because I remember last night I was dreaming about things that happened in my life 20 years ago that I haven't thought about since, and all of a sudden they popped back into my mind.
FRED: Exactly. Part of the function of dreams is to randomly refresh old memories. We have no control over what get refreshed and in what order, and that's why dreams are often so nonsensical. Now, everybody dreams but most of the time we don't remember our dreams, and that's probably a good thing.
Now there are a lot of Christians who are concerned about the content of their dreams.
SHAWN: Yeah, as a pastor, I have had people come to me and say, "Pastor, I'm dreaming about this, this and this, and I don't want to."
FRED: That's right. We have to remember, whatever inputs have come into the mind are placed into memory, whether they're sights, sounds, smells, feelings, etc., and there is a principle in Scripture, found in Philippians four, verse eight.
SHAWN: I know this one.
FRED: It says to "think upon these things" and then there is a criteria list. It's the filter.
SHAWN: What sort of things are true. What sort of things are just. Think on these things.
