Neurotransmitters in the brain, stages of sleep

“The Mind at Night” by Andrea Rock, which is the book I bought few years ago and have read it once. But as for my bad memory, I don’t remember the detail at all, so I just started reading it again.

There are many things I already know, but also many things I don’t even remember at all, feeling like reading a new book.

The Japanese title of this book can be translated “Brain doesn’t sleep”. This is about brain and dreams.

This is my reading notes :-)

Recent happenings on early stage of the sleep

From dream and sleep study, people dreams recent events in early stage of the sleep, things like happened the day or images saw just before sleeping. At the late stage, just before waking up, there are more old memories, such as childhood or school days.

Not many people can taste and smell in the dream

Most people have “visual” image in the dreams. 50% of people have “sound”, 15% have “feelings”, but not much people can smell and taste in the dreams.

It is because of the part of the brain where can feel smell and taste are not active while sleeping, no wonder people can’t feel them.

However, talk about myself, I can smell and taste in my dreams. Sometimes I have beautiful food and drinks in my dreams, or sometimes smell very stinky stuff to wakes me up.

Human need sleep, insomnia can kill people

There are very  rare family transmissive insomnia disease called FFI (Fatal Familial Insomnia) which found in Italy in 1986. There are about 30 families in the world which has FFI. Usually people develop FFI age aroundd 40-50, they can’t sleep for few months or yeas untill they die. The thalami gets terrible damage but FFI is still on study, there are not much things we know about it.

More REM sleep on babies, less on elder people

a 26 weeks baby already has REM, seems like having REM all day. 50% of a new born baby’s sleep is REM, adult, 20-25%, elder people 15% etc.

Purpose of REM

People studied hard to figure out the purpose of the REM. While REM the connection of morter nerves to the muscle is cut, which is controled by brain. If this “offline” function didn’t work well, you’ll have sleep walking etc.

One study might tell the purpose of REM. The researchers cut the part of a cat’s brain where control “offline-online” muscles, the cat started fighting while REM.

It shows during REM, brain might be doing “image training” to survive. Even the body is not moved, if the brain nerves are active, it’s enough to make the system to defence or fight.

Neurotransmitters switching sleep/awake

While we are awake, there are 2 main neurotransmitters in our brain. One is Norepinephrine which is related to concentration. Another one is serotonin which related to dicision, learning and memorization.

While we are sleeping, these 2 neurotransmitters are not in our brain, thus you can see the reason clearly why we can’t remember breams.

During sleep, norepinephrine and serotonin are gone, then there will be Acetylcholine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter related to emotion, visual image and activities.

Dopamine might be related to the dreams

Dopamine – we know as happy neurotransmitter in our brain. This is very related to making image in the brain. If you don’t have dopamine in your brain, you don’t dream, you can’t imagine things, you loose inquisitive mind.

Lobotomy or rootcomy operation removed the part of the brain where transmits dopamine. The medication for schizophrenic disorder does the same thing, it works on the same part of the brain and block dopamine transmittion.

REM is not the only stage to dream

It used to be said that dreams are happening during REM, but actually not only REM. Other stage of sleep we also dream.

It seems like there are 2 different switches, one is controling REM or non-REM sleep, another one is controling dreams. We have more vivid dreams during REM, so people thought REM and dreams are very well related, some people say there are nothing special related.

Functions of dreams, training to survive

Most of human’s dreams are something negative. It could because of the way of researching, but many studies show the same result.

For myself, I always dream about being late when I have something important to attend.

People who got PTST have the same night mares over and over, but every time there are little changes, most of the time the night mares someday turn to positive – PTSD could be cured.

Image training changes your brain. Driving car and image training of driving car shows the same result in the brain.

Sleep learning works

During sleep, brain keep working to make complicated neuro networks. This become active while sleeping because brain is offlile, no input or output, brain can concentrate on working to develop the neuro network.

This is how sleep learning works. Keep brain offline to give it enough time to develop the neuronetwork.

Emotions in the dreams, brain goes offline while dreaming

As we see the ammount of the neurotransmitters in the brain, sleep must be related to the emotion. The ammout of Acetylcholine during sleep is more than that of during awake. Some parts of our brain working very active dring dreaming, it’s very  quiet while we are awake.

Thus we feel strong emotion in our dreams.

Depression and dreams

In depressed people’s brain, things are different. The part related to emotion works a lot more active than normal people. It even effects to the other part of the brain where usually offline during sleep.

We can guess from this. dream doesn’t cure depression. It bring the system to depressed circulation. The brain generates very nevative emotion, and even make it more stronger.

There is a oppotunitie to cure depression, waking up the patient during REM while the patient having depressed dreams, then it can stop the depressed circulation.

Dream theraphy

Dream is related to emotion, and the emotions we feel in dreams are a lot stronger than what we feel in awake. Dreams might work as a theraphy, from my experience, it does.

I don’t like analyzing dreams, but reading back my dream diary makes me to feel many many things, I can remember the emotion very clearly, I found many dreams which now became true.

Creative dreams

Musicians, artists, programmer or mathmaticans. People find new ideas or break throughs in their dreams.

I understand this. I have very vivid images in my dreams, sometimes I feel like almost crying because of the scene is too beautiful.

During dreaming, the logical thinking doesn’t work much, which helps us to think of something different.

Oh, I love dreaming… there are some more to write from this book, but now I feel like dreaming, going to put myself on bed and have dream, will write some more later when I come back from dreams.