What Is REM Sleep?
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a stage of sleep associated with dreaming and memory consolidation. REM sleep was first discovered in the 1950s, when scientists studying sleeping infants noticed that there were distinct periods when their eyes moved rapidly from side to side. These rapid eye movements, or REMs, earned REM sleep its name.

What Happens During REM Sleep?
During REM sleep, your eyes move rapidly behind your closed eyes, your heart rate speeds up, and your breathing becomes irregular. In contrast to other stages of sleep, in which your brain waves slow down, your brain is highly active during REM sleep, and your brain waves become more variable. During REM sleep, much of your body operates similarly to how it does when you’re awake, except your eyes are closed and you experience a temporary loss of muscle tone. Researchers have hypothesized that this is a protective measure, meant to stop you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself. However, now that scientists know we can experience dreams during non-REM sleep stages when our bodies are not paralyzed, this hypothesis is losing steam.

Why Is REM Sleep Important?
All sleep is important, but REM sleep in particular plays an important role in dreaming, memory, emotional processing, and healthy brain development.

• Dreaming: A majority of your dreams take place during REM sleep. However, REM is not the only stage in which dreams occur — that’s actually a common myth about sleep. That said, the dreams you experience in REM sleep are usually more vivid than non-REM sleep dreams.
• Emotional Processing: Your brain processes emotions during REM sleep. Dreams, which are more vivid in REM sleep, may be involved in emotional processing. Also, your amygdala, the part of your brain that processes emotions, activates during REM sleep.
• Memory Consolidation: During REM sleep, your brain processes new learnings and motor skills from the day, committing some to memory, maintaining others, and deciding which ones to delete. Some memory consolidation also takes place in deep sleep a non-REM stage.
• Brain Development: Researchers hypothesize REM sleep promotes brain development, since newborns spend most of their sleep time in REM. Adding to the evidence is that animals born with less developed brains, such as humans and puppies, spend even more time in REM sleep during infancy than those that are born with more developed brains, like horses and birds.
• Wakefulness Preparation: REM sleep, through its activation of our central nervous system, might help us get ready to wake back up. This may explain why we spend increasing amounts of time in REM sleep as the night progresses and why we are easier to wake up during this stage.

What Happens If You Don’t Get Enough REM Sleep?
Multiple studies of both humans and animals suggest that being deprived of REM sleep interferes with memory formation. However, memory problems associated with a loss of REM sleep could be due to overall sleep disruption, since those often occur together. Also, studies of the few rare individuals who do not experience REM sleep show that they do not experience problems with memory or learning. That said, REM sleep deprivation disrupts the brain’s ability to generate new cells. More research is needed to better understand the effects of REM sleep deprivation.

Resources : SleepFoundation - REM Sleep: What It Is and Why It’s Important
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep

Date of Input: 12/07/2024 | Updated: 22/10/2024 | aslamiah