Topic: rapid eye movements

REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements, from which it gets its acronym, and is often accompanied by vivid visual dreams. Rapid eye movements occurring during REM sleep are proposed to represent gaze shifts in the virtual environment of dreams, while other studies suggest that they simply reflect random brainstem activity. In order to address this issue, we recorded from head direction (HD) cells in the anterodorsal nucleus of the thalamus (ADN), a population of neurons whose activity reports heading of the animal. Previous work has shown that during REM sleep, the population activit

Sleep’s ubiquitous presence across the animal kingdom underscores its crucial role in an organism’s cognitive, emotional, and physiological function. In mammals, sleep is subdivided into two distinct substates: Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and Non-rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep. NREM sleep is marked by synchronized brain activity and muscle tone loss, while REM sleep is characterized by desynchronized brain activity, muscle atonia, and bursts of eye movements. Nevertheless, the definition of sleep varies across species making the evolutionary origin of distinct sleep states unclear. In orga