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According to a new study from the Dutch Institute of Neuroscience, nocturnal amygdala adjustment will fail proportionally to the paradoxical sleep agitation. The discovery helps to understand why you will be better able to support tomorrow what is grieving you today and why it can go wrong.
Something scary or unpleasant does not go unnoticed. In our brain, the so-called limbic circuit of cells and connections becomes immediately active.
First and foremost, such experiments activate the amygdala. This core of brain cells located deep in the brain can be thought of as the siren of the brain, signaling attention!
For the brain to function properly, the siren must also be turned off. For this, a restful sleep, the part of sleep with the most vivid dreams, turns out to be indispensable.
Good sleep
The researchers placed their participants in an MRI scanner in the evening and presented them with a specific odor while disturbing them. Brain badyzes showed how the amygdala had become active.
The participants then spent the night in the sleep laboratory, while the activity of their sleeping brain was measured with EEG and that specific odor was again presented on the occasion. The next morning, the researchers again tried to thwart their volunteers, just like the day before.
But now they have not done so well.
The brain circuits were adapted from one day to the next; the siren of the brain was no longer sounding. The amygdala was much less responsive, especially to those who had slept a great deal in restorative sleep and were exposed to a specific odor in the meantime.
Bad sleep
But among the participants were also people with restless REM sleep. Things are surprisingly different for them.
The brain circuits were not well adapted overnight: the siren of the brain continued to ring the next morning. And while the nocturnal odor exposure helped people in restful sleep to adapt, the same exposure only worsened the situation of people in REM sleep restlessness.
During sleep, the "memory traces" of the previous day's experiences are read spontaneously, like a movie.
"Among all the vestiges of the day, a specific memory trace can be activated by presenting the same smell that was present during the experiment when you are awake. Meanwhile, traces of memory are adjusted during sleep: some connections between brain cells are strengthened, others are weakened. Restless paradoxical sleep disrupts these nocturnal adjustments essential to recovery and adaptation to distress ",
says Rick Wbading, first author of the study.
Maybe help the transdiagnosis
This discovery may be of great importance to about two-thirds of all people with mental disorders, as restless paradoxical sleep and an overactive tonsil characterize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, depression and stroke. # 39; insomnia.
People with PTSD postpone their traumatic experience to the next day: people with anxiety disorders carry their greatest fear, depressive despair and chronic insomnia their tension. Authors Rick Wbading, Frans Schalkwijk and Eus van Someren believe that the treatment of restless paradoxical sleep could help transdiagnostically treat emotional memories overnight and give them a better place in the brain.
The work was funded by a grant from the ZONMW Neuropsychobadysis Fund of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), a grant from the Bial Foundation and grants from the European Research Council.
Rick Wbading, Oti Lakbila-Kamal, Jennifer R. Ramautar, Diederick's lawyers, Frans Schalkwijk, Eus J.W. Van Someren
Paradoxical sleep hinders night adaptation of the amygdala
Current biology; July 11, 2019, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.034
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