The brain needs sleep not only to rest and detoxify, but also to maintain its ability to adapt to stress, recover from disruptions, and continue learning. Scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences came to this conclusion. The results were published in the journal Brain Medicine (BM).
The authors of the study believe that the main function of sleep is the maintenance of the so-called nervous resistance. Resilience, as distinct from simple resilience, refers to the brain's ability to reorganize itself after injury, stress, or environmental changes while maintaining normal function.
According to researchers, different stages of sleep perform different functions. During deep, non-REM sleep, the brain reorganizes connections between neurons, preventing the overload that occurs after learning and accumulating new information. During rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, neural networks become more flexible; the brain explores new connection patterns and loosens those that have become too rigid.
"If we consider the brain as a complex dynamic network, sleep is not presented as simple recharging, but as a specially designated time for system recovery and reorganization," said study co-author Xiaohui Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Furthermore, during deep sleep, the glymphatic system is activated, a mechanism that clears the brain of metabolic waste products, including beta-amyloid protein, which is associated with the development of Alzheimer's disease.
According to the authors, the alternating stages of slow-wave and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep allow the brain to simultaneously remove "biological waste", restore neural connections and maintain the ability to adapt to new conditions.
Researchers believe that these principles can be useful not only in medicine, but also in the development of artificial intelligence. Modern neural networks often lose previously acquired knowledge when learning new tasks, while the introduction of "sleep" analogs already helps them better remember information and recover from failures.
