9.3 Why Sleep? Why Rem? Why Dream? Flashcards

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0
Q

____ serves many functions. During sleep, we rest our muscles, decrease metabolism, rebuild proteins in the brain, reorganise synapses, and strengthen memories.

A

Sleep

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1
Q

You feel tired at the end of the day because ____ processes in your brain force you to become less aroused and less alert.

A

inhibitory

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2
Q

People who don’t get enough sleep have trouble concentrating and become more vulnerable to illness, especially ____ ____.

A

mental illness

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3
Q

Even one night of sleeplessness activates the ____ ____. That is, you react to sleep deprivation as if you were ill. With more prolonged sleep deprivation, people report dizziness, tremors, and hallucinations.

A

immune system

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4
Q

During sleep, a mammals body temperature decreases by 1° or 2°C, enough to save a significant amount of ____.

A

energy

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5
Q

Also during sleep, ____ activity decreases, saving more energy.

A

muscle

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6
Q

Animals ____ their sleep duration during food shortages, when energy conservation is especially important.

A

increase

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7
Q

If one of the main functions of sleep is to shutdown activities at times of relative inefficiency, we might expect to find _________ in species that are equally effective at all times of the day. This appears to be true.

A

little or no sleep

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8
Q

Another apparent function of sleep is improved ____.

A

memory

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9
Q

If people learn something and then go to ____, or even take a nap, their memory often improves beyond what it was before the sleep.

A

sleep

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10
Q

Sleep also helps people ____ their memories: in one study, people who just practised a complex task were more likely to perceive a hidden rule after a period of sleep than after a similar period of wakefulness.

A

reanalyse

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11
Q

Another study found that a nap that included REM sleep enhanced performance on certain kinds of ____ ____ ____.

A

creative problem solving

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12
Q

Researchers recorded activity in the ____ during learning, and then recorded the same locations during sleep. Results: patterns that occurred during sleep resembled those that occurred during learning, except that they were more rapid during sleep.

A

hippocampus

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13
Q

The amount of hippocampal activity during sleep correlated highly with subsequent improvement in ____.

A

performance

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14
Q

These results suggest that the brain ____ its daily experiences during sleep.

A

replays

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15
Q

The hippocampus replays recently learned patterns during quiet ____ periods, not just during sleep.

A

waking

16
Q

Another aspect of sleeps contribution to memory relates to sleep spindles. They indicate an exchange of information between the ____ and the ____ ____. In both rats and humans, sleep spindles increase in number after new learning.

A

thalamus : cerebral cortex.

17
Q

Dream research faces a special problem: what we know that dreams comes from people’s ____, and researchers have no way to check the accuracy of those reports.

A

self-reports

18
Q

According to the ____-____ ____, a dream represents the brains efforts to make sense of sparse and distorted information.

A

activation-synthesis hypothesis

19
Q

Dreams begin with periodic bursts of spontaneous activity in the ____ – the PGO waves previously described – that activates some parts of the cortex but not others.

A

pons

20
Q

The ____ combines this haphazard input with whatever other activity was already occurring and does its best to synthesise a story that makes sense of the information.

A

cortex

21
Q

____ ____, such as sounds in the room, occasionally get incorporated into a dream, although usually they do not.

A

Sensory stimuli

22
Q

An alternative view of dreams has been labelled the ____ ____ because it was derived from the clinical studies of patients with various kinds of brain damage.

A

clinicoanatomical hypothesis

23
Q

Clinicoanatomical hypothesis emphasises that dreams begin with arousing stimuli that are ____ within the brain combined with recent memories and any information the brain is receiving from the senses.

A

generated

24
Q

However, the clinico-anatomical hypothesis puts less emphasis on the pons, PGO waves, or REM sleep. It regards dreams as thinking that takes place under unusual conditions, similar to ______ during everyday life.

A

mind-wondering

25
Q

Patients with damage to the ____ ____ have problems binding body sensations with vision. They also report no dreams.

A

parietal cortex

26
Q

Fairly high activity is also found in the areas of the ____ ____ outside V1. Those areas are presumably important for the visual imagery that accompanies most dreams.

A

visual cortex

27
Q

Finally, activity is high in the ____, ____, and other areas important for emotions and motivations.

A

hypothalamus, amygdala