Unraveling the developmental and evolutionary constraints on sleep

-Anwita Sarkar, Team bioXone

Thomas Dekker once popularly remarked that “Sleep is the golden chain that binds health and our bodies together”. Dekker’s statement was indeed a true one. Modern-day living across the world does not embrace the importance of sleep and has taken its functions and needs for granted. The necessity of sleep can be determined by two of the most leading hypothesis that sleep prevents neuronal damage and reorganize neural networks necessary for maintaining synaptic homeostasis.

A study was conducted to create a novel mechanistic framework that can be used to quantitatively compare sleep ontogeny with sleep phylogeny. It was also used to distinguish between sleep used for neural reorganization versus repair. An abrupt sharp transition was observed between 2 and 3 years of age in humans. Results revealed that neural reorganization supporting learning is primarily due to changes in the sleep during early ontogeny ( before 2 or 3 years)while the repair is supported by differences in sleep across the phylogeny and after 2 or 3 years in a human.

Moreover, there is substantial evidence that infants spend more time in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep compared with older children and adults. This finding suggests that REM is crucial for neuroplastic reorganization. Thus the generation of this novel theory, compiling the data of sleep and brain development suggests a complex interplay between developmental and evolutionary constraints on sleep.

Source: Cao Junyu, Herman B Alexander, West B Geoffrey, Poe Gina, Savage M Van Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development, Science Advances  18 Sep 2020: Vol. 6, no. 38, D.O.I : http://10.1126/sciadv.aba0398.

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