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Earthquake-like brain-wave bursts found to be essential for healthy sleep
Sleep is traditionally considered to be a homeostatic process that resists deviation from equilibrium. In that regard, brief episodes of waking are viewed as perturbations that lead to sleep fragmentation and related sleep disorders. While addressing aspects of sleep regulation related to consolidated sleep and wake and the sleep-wake cycle, the homeostatic paradigm does not account for the dozens of abrupt sleep-stage transitions and micro-states within sleep stages throughout the night. Jilin WJL Wang et. al. test the hypothesis that, while sleep is homeostatic at time scales of hours and days, non-equilibrium dynamics and criticality underlie sleep micro-architecture at a shorter time scales. Their research shows that cortical arousals and brief awakenings during sleep exhibit non-equilibrium dynamics and complex organization across time scales which follow the same mathematical laws as earthquakes, and are necessary for maintaining healthy sleep.
Image Credit: Jilin WJL Wang and Plamen Ch. Ivanov, Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Boston University, USA
Citation: (2019) PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 15(11) December 2019. PLoS Comput Biol 15(11): ev15.i11. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v15.i11
Published: December 2, 2019
Copyright: © 2019 . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Sleep is traditionally considered to be a homeostatic process that resists deviation from equilibrium. In that regard, brief episodes of waking are viewed as perturbations that lead to sleep fragmentation and related sleep disorders. While addressing aspects of sleep regulation related to consolidated sleep and wake and the sleep-wake cycle, the homeostatic paradigm does not account for the dozens of abrupt sleep-stage transitions and micro-states within sleep stages throughout the night. Jilin WJL Wang et. al. test the hypothesis that, while sleep is homeostatic at time scales of hours and days, non-equilibrium dynamics and criticality underlie sleep micro-architecture at a shorter time scales. Their research shows that cortical arousals and brief awakenings during sleep exhibit non-equilibrium dynamics and complex organization across time scales which follow the same mathematical laws as earthquakes, and are necessary for maintaining healthy sleep.
Image Credit: Jilin WJL Wang and Plamen Ch. Ivanov, Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Boston University, USA