Sleep and dreams to restore energy and activity

Sleep and dreams are an active process of restoring energy and activity

Encephalistis Lethargica

After World War I, a terrifying disease spread throughout Europe that often resulted in the death of its victims. It was a disease caused by contamination by a virus called Encephalistis Lethargica.

The first stage of infection was characterized by fever and agitation, and after several weeks it was followed by a state of lethargy, lethargy, and sleepiness.

On top of all this is an unnatural kind of long sleep. And the question began to arise about that formation in the brain that could be responsible for this state that leads to sleep and dreams.

When a microscopic examination of the brain tissues of patients who died of J disease was conducted, it became clear that the contamination was associated with changes in the cells in the interbrain known as dienchephalon.

Was this the cause of the excessive sleep? Later, in the 1920s, scientists, by carrying out experiments on animals, were able to investigate in more detail the brain structures responsible for regulating sleep.

Brain centers and regulate the process of sleep

And it led to heated disputes among specialists: Is sleep a negative process that arises only because of the end or cessation of the state of wakefulness, as claimed by the Roman poet Lucretius?

Or is it an active, positive process that begins in some specific brain center? Frederic Bremer, a Belgian neurophysiologist, was an outstanding advocate and defender of the first theory.

Experiences

He tried with his experiments during the 1930s to show that the state of wakefulness can continue as long as there are sensory stimuli returned to the animal's brain from the environment.

And when he examined the nerve pathways that connect the sense organs to the brain, it became clear to him that laboratory animals enter into a continuous, continuous state of sleep.

And this result was witnessed by a kind of support for the hypothesis that sleep is a negative process that occurs when the stimulant effects are absent or disappear.

Study the effect of electrical stimuli on behavior

As for the most important scholars opposing this theory, Walter Hess, a professor of physiology at the University of Zurich, who presented studies on the interpretation of dreams (tafsir ahlam).

Hess was among the first to find a way to study the effect of electrical stimuli on behavior by implanting or installing permanent microelectrodes in specific regions of the brain of laboratory animals.

And recently, doctors have followed this procedure to treat patients, in particular to identify and exclude the epileptic focus from the brain.

Since the brain cannot sense pain, we found that implantation of electrodes and electrical stimulation did not cause the patient any pain.

Hess noticed that stimulating certain areas of the brain causes the animal to seek its resting place, to take its usual sleeping position and then succumb to sleepiness.

Although the animal could be awakened at any time, the stimuli had to reach a certain level of intensity in order to be able to alert the animal exactly as it is in a normal sleep state.

After electrical stimulation via the electrodes, the animal was more often than not sleeping for several hours.

Scientists' attempts to stimulate sleep

There are special sites in the interbrain. If the electrodes were implanted in them, it would have been very easy to induce sleep and enter the stage of rapid eye movement sleep in which dreams occur.

These results of Hess's findings cast doubt on the negative sleep theory, as long as it has been shown from his experiments that sleep occurs by stimulating the brain, and once an external, live stimulus is excluded.

Hess's view of brain function was an integrated one that made him not view sleep as an isolated process that could be studied separately from all other physiological processes.

In 1931 he wrote, “Our attempt to investigate the question of the nature of sleep is based on the assumption that this problem cannot be solved on its own, but rather in the context of the analysis of the overall functional formation of the organism.

He distinguished between two basic functional states: the state of wakefulness towards action (Ergotropic State), which prevails during the day and makes the organism capable of effective forms of behavior such as attack or combat;

And the state of inactivity, rest and compensation, which allows the body to retain energy and restore vitality and avoid excessive stress. Hess said sleep is "a distinct and important energy recovery function."