Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,327
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
Well, at least partly.
See:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/...lick&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article
"Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep.Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.
A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.
In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise."
In the years since they figured out a way to test it in the lab.
"The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. “That there’s such a big change over all is surprising,” Dr. Tononi said.
The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University."
"they found that the number of surface proteins dropped during sleep. That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking.
Dr. Diering and his colleagues then searched for the molecular trigger for this change. They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night. But one protein in particular, called Homer1A, stood out."
"Dr. Diering’s research suggests that sleepiness triggers neurons to make Homer1A and ship it into their synapses. When sleep arrives, Homer1A turns on the pruning machinery."
"In their own experiment, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues found that the pruning didn’t strike every neuron. A fifth of the synapses were unchanged. It’s possible that these synapses encode well-established memories that shouldn’t be tampered with.
“You can forget in a smart way,” Dr. Tononi said.
Other researchers cautioned that the new findings weren’t definitive proof of the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis."
See:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/...lick&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article
"Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep.Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.
A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.
In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise."
In the years since they figured out a way to test it in the lab.
"The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. “That there’s such a big change over all is surprising,” Dr. Tononi said.
The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University."
"they found that the number of surface proteins dropped during sleep. That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking.
Dr. Diering and his colleagues then searched for the molecular trigger for this change. They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night. But one protein in particular, called Homer1A, stood out."
"Dr. Diering’s research suggests that sleepiness triggers neurons to make Homer1A and ship it into their synapses. When sleep arrives, Homer1A turns on the pruning machinery."
"In their own experiment, Dr. Tononi and his colleagues found that the pruning didn’t strike every neuron. A fifth of the synapses were unchanged. It’s possible that these synapses encode well-established memories that shouldn’t be tampered with.
“You can forget in a smart way,” Dr. Tononi said.
Other researchers cautioned that the new findings weren’t definitive proof of the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis."