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New data suggests that sleep has a bigger purpose outside of simple downtime. <\/p>\n
It may help the brain stay flexible enough to recover from stress<\/a>, adapt to change, and keep learning over a lifetime.<\/p>\n That ability, the authors argue, could explain why sleep has survived through hundreds of millions of years of evolution despite leaving animals vulnerable to predators.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to move past the idea that sleep is simply a battery recharging overnight,\u201d said Professor Xiaohui Wang of the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry<\/a>, Chinese Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the brain as a complex dynamic network, sleep starts to resemble something a careful engineer would design on purpose, a scheduled window for the system to repair and reorganize itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond staying stable<\/p>\n The researchers say many discussions about sleep mix together three different ideas, stability, robustness, and resilience. Although they sound similar, they describe different abilities.<\/p>\n Stability means the brain<\/a> can keep working despite small disturbances. Robustness means it can continue functioning even when faced with noise, gradual changes, or partial damage. <\/p>\n Resilience goes further. It describes the brain\u2019s ability to absorb a setback, reorganize itself, and regain healthy function over time.<\/p>\n The authors argue that sleep plays its biggest role in protecting this resilience across a network of roughly 86 billion neurons<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two stages, two jobs<\/p>\n The paper describes the two main stages of sleep as partners with different responsibilities.<\/p>\n During non-rapid eye movement, or NREM sleep, especially deep slow-wave sleep, brain activity slows to rhythms below one hertz.<\/p>\n During this period, connections between neurons that have grown stronger through learning<\/a> are adjusted so the brain does not become overloaded.<\/p>\n Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep<\/a>, takes a different approach. Brain activity becomes more active and less synchronized.<\/p>\n The researchers suggest REM sleep helps the brain explore different patterns of activity and loosen connections that have become too rigid.<\/p>\n An important transition during sleep<\/p>\n The transition between these two stages may be especially important. According to the authors, the brain reaches its highest level of metastability during these moments. <\/p>\n This causes it to be more ready to shift between different activity patterns. Deep NREM sleep also supports another important process.<\/p>\n During this stage, the brain\u2019s glymphatic system expands the spaces between cells and clears away metabolic waste, including amyloid-beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer\u2019s disease<\/a>.<\/p>\n While brain connections are being adjusted, waste products are removed at the same time.<\/p>\n \u201cA network that only optimizes can paint itself into a corner. What sleep appears to protect is the ability to get back out,\u201d said Longwei Yang, the study\u2019s lead author. <\/p>\n Lessons for AI<\/p>\n The authors believe these ideas could reach beyond biology. Modern artificial intelligence systems often struggle with catastrophic forgetting, overfitting, and network saturation.<\/p>\n When trained on new tasks, they can lose knowledge gained from earlier ones. The paper points to several studies showing that sleep-inspired techniques can help.<\/p>\n Sleep Replay Consolidation allowed artificial neural networks to hold on to old skills while learning new ones.<\/p>\n Other researchers reported similar improvements in spiking neural networks after introducing sleep-like offline activity. <\/p>\n Taking a break to reorganize <\/p>\n Another study found that continuously trained networks developed unhealthy activity until oscillating noise, designed to resemble slow-wave sleep, restored stable behavior.<\/p>\n \u201cThe striking thing is the convergence,\u201d said Professor Haohong Li of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, whose research centers on sleep homeostasis and neural oscillations.<\/p>\n \u201cReplay, renormalization, pruning, and noise injection turn up as solutions in both brains and machines.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWe are not claiming that a server farm sleeps. We are saying that any learning system running in a changing world may need structured offline phases to remain resilient.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors suggest that future AI systems could alternate between NREM-like periods that strengthen existing knowledge and REM-like periods that reorganize information. <\/p>\n Instead of judging performance by accuracy alone, they argue that researchers should also measure how well a system recovers after disruption.<\/p>\n Implications for human health<\/p>\n The idea may also help explain why disrupted sleep often appears alongside conditions such as Alzheimer\u2019s disease, schizophrenia<\/a>, and epilepsy. <\/p>\n According to the review, these disorders are associated with fragile brain networks and disturbed sleep patterns. <\/p>\n The authors suggest that treatments designed to strengthen slow-wave sleep could eventually improve the brain\u2019s ability to recover rather than simply provide a better night\u2019s sleep.<\/p>\n Quiet hours support resilience <\/p>\n The researchers also stress that this remains a perspective rather than proof. <\/p>\n Their proposal combines existing findings into a framework that can be tested through future experiments.<\/p>\n Changing sleep-like phases should improve recovery after disruption, alter measures of brain activity in specific ways, and direct replay toward the most vulnerable parts of a network.<\/p>\n Instead of viewing sleep as a period when the brain shuts down, this perspective argues that those quiet hours may be when the brain does some of its most important work.<\/p>\n During sleep, the brain is preserving its ability to adapt, recover, and keep functioning in a changing world.<\/p>\n The full study was published in the journal Brain Medicine<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.\u00a0<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sleep can feel like a pause button. Your body slows down, your eyes close, and the outside world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-781404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}