How the Brain Works & Why We Sleep and Dream

How the Brain Works: Why We Sleep; Why We Dream, Sleep-Walk, Sleep-Talk & Twitch - A hypothesis by Tim Craig

• Whole body restorative function is neither the purpose of sleep, nor is it significantly aided by sleep, which, in all its forms, from catnapping to deep sleep, is a mentally initiated phase of the body's functionality. It is a mode in which experiential, pattern association and replication takes place. A cognitive phase dealing with recent experiential information and committal of resonant information to mature memory for future recognition. Any symptom of tiredness or fatigue is the brain signalling for a mental maintenance phase.
• Sleeping is, and is only, the necessary bodily shutdown mode from WSC¹ to ACM² - An invasive cyclic phase during which the brain's nerve end region's fledgling patterns are tested for correlation with established/mature, deep brain patterns in a process we have loosely come to describe, and experience, when spuriously semi-conscious, as dreaming.
• Dreaming is that processing mode in which, with neuromuscular paths intentionally blocked, there occurs a sub-conscious scenario play-out during which an invasive and normally sub-consciousuo operation, recursively³ explores mature memories seeking associations with the newly acquired patterns located in volatile nerve-end terminating brain regions.On finding positive associations, the new nerve-end region's patterns are replicated into mature memory regions before they naturally expire in a timely manner.
• During sleep it is the mature/established brain region that is recursively trawled (by random hippocampal accessing) and its patterns correlated with fledgling nerve-end localised information. So, in the course or dreaming we eventually test new experiences against ALL mature memories. The wide diversity of information arising in such an exploration provides a clue into the diversity of dreams which are constrained by both real and imaginary memory. Explained in another way, in the pattern-associating mode a recursive/random-walk scan of mature memory naturally encounters diverse patterns, which, together with the new experiential information trigger, viable dream state scenarios, all guided by sparse mature memory and new candidate information for DSC⁴ plausibility. Hence the extraordinary scenarios of dreams, generally and properly, intended to remain in the unconscious; never to see the light of day. This is why dreams can be so strange, because, unconstrained by rational sensory information, dream consciousness scenarios play-out with greatly attenuated sensory constraint rationality and are themselves a revealing indicate of the role and degree of imagination. Though some input, senses, remain active. For instance an alarm clock wakes you and you'll sometimes find that manifesting in your dream in some manner.
• Exhaustion, Irrational behaviour: At the stage that nerve-end brain connectivity regions request a sleep requirement they are effectively saturated and no longer able to usefully process further information. Proper function of that region is lost leading to wider irrational cognition.
• A plurality of chemical⁵ sleep initiation requests constitutes an effectively proportional sleep inducement by specific brain regions. (next paper)
• The trigger and duration of sleep is determined by the task duration of the cyclic associative replication of quarantined patterns into mature, deep brain regions. A study is required to demonstrate the degree to which a sensory deprived brain will fail to initiate the sleep phase.
• Conversely, beyond extraordinary sensorialy saturated limits a brain will prematurely trigger sleep. Viz. tiredness/fatigue experienced following the apparently passive task of an extended car journey's extensive visual stimulus.
• The brain regions surrounding nerve end bundles may be considered as a local, if volatile, caches for the immediate working memory that retain sensory patterns to be subsequently replicated into mature brain regions, on positive associations, prior to those pattern's natural expiry, during the DSC.
• Dreaming is an essential stage of learning. Whilst we learn in a wakeful state we continue the learning task, intensively, during sleep. Unless under sensory deprivation we always experience cyclic DSC so, although we may not realise it, we always 'dream'. Consider the recollections and confusion immediately following an unexpected and premature awakening as the brain transitions in a disorderly manner from ACM to WSC. In a normal waking consciousness transition this does not ocur. It is only erroneously that we consciously recall our dreams from ACM. To avoid the conflict of consciousnesses plurality, it is essential for sanity's sake that the brain isolates, compartmentalises, ACS and ACM.
• Subjects will describe, especially on event of unexpected arousal, a sense of dream consciousness being drawn away in the immediate moments of awakening as the transition from sleep state to wake state occurs. We are sensing the switch from the dream state consciousness to wakeful-state consciousness and the dissonance of a consciousness pluralism which unsurprisingly leads to temporary confusion.
• Brain magnetic resonance scans have reveal that WSC and ACM appear similar. This should be unsurprising, of course, since the modus operandi of the state we most vaguely understand as 'consciousness' functions similarly whether in full wakefulness or during sleep. That dream that 'seemed so real' is exactly as-it-supposed-to-be!
• Dreaming, twitching, sleep-talking and sleep-walking are erroneous modes in which the brain has failed to fully shut down the body's motor neurological paths properly. Not generally a critical failing but nevertheless an erroneous mode.
• The replication of patterns from the volatile nerve-end regions to mature deep brain regions suggests that all recalled experiences are actually 'copies', an indirect experience from the 'direct' or 'real world' experience initially perceived copied by way of a selective dream state consciousness..
• Such decoupling of perceived experience being based on replicated information and the DSC being responsible for placing possibly best-case pattern associations enhanced from earlier experience into mature memory reveals the potential susceptibility of the brain to convincing hypnotic reprogramming.

• Working Memory. Through necessary associations with existing, mature patterns, this flowering nerve-end brain regions in conjunction with corroboration from mature deep brain patterns, provides the body with adequate wakeful state facility.
• As is proposed, unconstrained dreaming is a necessary part of learning and cognition. This requires the role of a wild, experimental, imaginative, even, irrational,  plausibility test as being the key to the selective memorising and interpretation of novel wakefulness state experience. Does this provide a clue to the recently explored link⁶ between exceptional mental ability, creativity and insanity⁷?
• In the Dream State Consciousness the Narrative plausibility test and the formal role of imagination⁸ in cognitive development need much study.
• The nerve bundles of the eye, ear terminate to unique brain regions. In such an arrangement independent short-term / volatile / cache brain regions are addressed. These respective nerve-end bundles' caches behave as responsive but volatile, short-lived, storage. If their patterns are not associated with mature memory patterns and replicated in a timely manner , i.e. during sleep or in wakefulness, these patterns will expire and fade within a timescale measured in hours. Hence sleep may not be delayed indefinitely without loss of information
• There has been some discussion⁹ of inadequate rest when sleep is disturbed; such as sleeping with a TV operating.
  I propose that the reason for such observation is that the auditory nerve-end cache region is overloading with a stream of new information and, as explained earlier, continuing to (chemically) request sleep.
• The fundamental reason that is sleep we seek to lie still, close our eyes and seek peace is to minimise sensory stimulus.

http://neurosciencethoughts.blogspot.com/

Tim Craig (behavneurobio@neumena.com)

Bristol, UK

From research (c) 1988 - 2010

---

Wider NS conjectures

• On empathetic responses 
• Hard-coded brain responses. It can be observed that babies immediately respond to the crying of other babies or even their parents, and conversely, with equal discomfort. This behaviour can be observed diversely, amongst other species. Dogs, with seemingly tuned behavioural awareness and body language, will howl in response to the howls of distant dogs or even similar sounds such as sirens and bells. This is perhaps a socially supportive widening of the group's distress call. My conjecture is that the dogs' howl, like the baby's cry, is the species safety call to 'group', so essential for the survival of the species, to assemble for unspecified but historically beneficial support that it has come to be evolved for survival. 
• Since proposing these ideas I learned of the Italian Parma Group's discovery of the Mirror Neuron¹⁰. As I predicted the mechanism is variously described as inducing feelings in the self equivalent to that within subject expressing the emotion. It seems that we now have some explanation for the contagion of crying, laughing, even yawning.
• On the role of the Utricle & Saccule
• It is widely accepted¹¹ that the function of the utricle & saccule directly controls a body balancing mechanism. Whilst it is true that I propose, however, that this role, as it exists, is an indirect phenomena working in conjuncttion with the visual field clues and that the mechanism has little, per se, to do with bodily stability but exists for the primary purpose of visual field translational adjustment. Subjected to a moving body and head a visual field translation is essential for the eye-bound optical integration of the visual field for optimal sensitivity and resolution. Dizziness is the mental disorientation resulting from the dissonance of the anticipated optical field and corrupted utricle and saccule information whose erroneous signals lead to an improper degree of translational shifting of the optical field, and therefore instability through improper neuromuscular control for balance.

notes

¹ WSC - Wakefulness State Conciousness

² ACM - Associating Conciousness Mode - Dreaming

³ Or quite possibly random firings from the pons.

⁴ DSC - Dreaming State Conciousness

⁵ GABA mechanisms and sleep: Gottesmann. Neuroscience 2002;111(2):231-9
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/gaba.htm

⁶ Fredrik Ullen, Karolinska Institutet.

⁷ Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010670
'Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10154775

⁸ Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley: "Cognitive stretches are made possible by the brain’s ability to create abstract representations of the world, imagine things that don’t exist yet in those representations, and build them.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2006/august-06/a-learning-machine-plasticity-and-change-throughout-life.html

⁹ Dr. Edward Stepanski, slleep fragmentation. Rush University Medical Center. Reported: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D6103BF931A25753C1A9629C8B63&sec=health&pagewanted=all

¹⁰ Mirror Neuron Systems. The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social
Cognition
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34662033/Mirro-Neuron-Systems

¹¹ BBC - Science & Nature
Nervous system - Balance http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/factfiles/balance/balance_animation.shtml