Why can't you just wire someones brain up and monitor the signals they
produce and try to figure them out? Ultimately, no will figure out anything
about this subject w/o direct, and extensive, observation.
yan king yin <y.k.y(at)lycos(dot)com> wrote in message
news:9e5vei$cam5 at imsp212.netvigator.com...
> "Theophilus Samuels" <theophilus.samuels at btinternet.com>:
> > Technically, the proportion of quiet sleep (i.e. greater muscle tone,
steady
> > respiration and adequate temperature homeostasis) remains much the same
from
> > birth to old age, at about 5 hours per night. But rather it's the amount
of
> > active sleep or REM sleep (i.e. eye movements, flaccid skeletal
musculature,
> > erratic respiration and heart-beat, loss of temperature control) that
> > decreases with age.
>> Agreed, just want to add that REM sleep is when dreams occur, and dreams
are
> usually _not_ the exact play-back of daytime activities. Freud has
pointed
> out an example where the alarm clock ran off while a person was sleeping
and
> in his dream he heard an ambulance passing by (or something like that).
This
> seems more like free association to me. REM sleep also has a *higher*
meta-
> -bolic rate than wakefulness, thats why its also called paradoxical sleep.
> So, why does the brain engage in costly REM sleep?
>> (To generate random connections?)
>>>
