Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Sleep Stages
In class we were talking about the cycles of sleeping and the four stages that happen when we are sleeping. Stage one starts with a very light sleep and your muscles contract. In stage 2, you slowly go into a deeper sleep and when you hit 3 and 4, you are in a deep sleep. At these stages, it is said your blood pressure and temperature drops and delta waves in your brain begins. Then after the last stages comes the REM stage where most of the brain activity takes place. My question is why the brain works the way it does? It seems as if whatever I'm thinking about before I got to bed is what I wake up thinking about. Why is that? Also, it is said one cycle of sleep is about an hour and a half and we should have about 5-7 a night, but what happens if we wake up at the wrong stage of sleep? Do we forget what we were thinking about? Does this lead to some side effects we will then face throughout the day? Im very curious to learn more about our sleeping process and find the answers!
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When we read in class, we saw that the cycles of sleeping change over the course of the night. We only experience stages 3 and 4 at the beginning of the night, and after a few cycles, we just go between rem and stages 1 and 2. So this makes it very unlikely for us to be woken at deep sleep. But when we are woken up, I personally have experienced memory loss of when I was awake and went back to sleep. So I think that if you wake up during a deep sleep, you will experience a memory "boggle" like the girl with narcolepsy had.
ReplyDeleteBailey, when you say wrong stage of sleep, what are you trying to say? What is a wrong stage? If you mean that we are supposed to wake up during light sleep, then a wrong stage would be 3 and 4 and during REM. This is why sometimes when you wake up, it is harder than other times. It seems like it takes until midmorning to fully awaken. As to your other point about waking up thinking about the same thing we were the night before, I think I may have some insight. If you believe that dreams are a way of processing and resolving information we have gained, then I think it is safe to say that we wake up thinking about the same thing because our brain decides during deep sleep and REM that we still need that information. This may explain why sometimes you dream about what you're thinking about before bed or remember important information in a dream. I hope this helps!
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