(Medical Xpress)—Despite decades of research, little is known about the function of REM sleep, or the dreams that often accompany it. Rapid eye movements occur in most mammals, with a few exceptions like echidnas and dolphins. In humans, they be become common by the seventh month of pregnancy, and persist throughout life even in the congenitally blind. Researchers have developed techniques to perform a full electrical sleep analysis on subjects while they are simultaneously scanned inside an MRI machine. A new study in PNAS now reports that REM sleep can be distinguished from other states of consciousness by virtue of rhythmic correlations, and anticorrelations, between different areas of the brain.
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