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Brain Activity During Sleep Essay

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Brain Activity During Sleep Essay
Brain Activity During Sleep
Imagine spending 1/3 of your life doing something and not knowing why you do it or what purpose is behind it. Sleep is one of the greatest mysteries that science is struggling with. It was once considered an inactive or passive state in which the mind used to recuperate from the day. This of course is not true, since the brain is in active stages while asleep and sometimes may even reach to a higher state of awareness than when awake. This fact has bewildered many scientists, and researchers have yet to find an answer to why our brain acts at a higher state while asleep. What’s going on inside our brain while we sleep? Nearly every day we leave consciousness and enter a state of dreams and deep sleep, yet we wake up unaware of what has happened during the time asleep. If we ask someone to tell us about what they dreamt the results are almost always unreliable. In fact it’s estimated that we forget 95% of the dreams we have, especially within the first 10 minutes of having them.
In the early1950’s an incredible incident occurred. A researcher named Eugene Aserinsky, also known as The Stubborn Scientist, had made a ground breaking discovery, by constantly staying up at night in order to research his patients
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During this time the brain gives notions hinting that the person is awake but the person is sound asleep. The only thing that you see is jerky eye movements. In fact if scientists did not see the eye movements of a person in REM, they couldn’t have differentiated their brain activity during sleep from the waking state. This was another mystery the scientists were bewildered by and so the experiments began. They found out that during this stage people remember the dreams they have after they wake up, but soon the dreams vanish due to the quick transformation of the brain. And this phenomenon is known as Lucid

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