CEREBRAL INFORMATION PROCESSING DURING SLEEP: EVOLUTIONARY AND ECOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Abstract

Based on the analysis of extensive clinical, psychophysiological and experimental data, the author comes to the conclusion that the widespread idea of the cerebral information processing during sleep related to previous wakefulness and necessary for the formation of long-term memory and other cognitive resources of the brain is inapplicable. This hypothesis does not agree well with a wide range of data regarding both non-REM and REM sleep. The state of the cerebral cortex in non-REM sleep is more adequately described by the classical term “diffuse cortical inhibition.” As for REM sleep, here, too, the very intensive work of the brain does not play any adaptive role (at least for an adult organism) - information is processed, figuratively speaking, “idle”. All the vast experimental and clinical material accumulated in recent decades speaks in favor of the “ecological” hypothesis, which considers sleep as periods of “adaptive inactivity” of the body, increasing its survival in a hostile environment. The function of sleep, perhaps, consists in a radical restructuring of all waking reflexes for the normal course of such periods.