19 suka
- nigms_nihScientists have long suspected that as your body sleeps, your brain works hard. Now they have photographic evidence.
Using a cutting-edge microscopy technique, researchers studied projections called dendritic spines on the nerve cells of mice. Spines (knobby bumps in this 3D image of mouse nerve cells) allow messages to spread from one nerve cell to another, which is basically how the nervous system (of mice and humans) works.
The researchers found that after mice had slept, the volume of their spines decreased significantly, and the message-passing spaces (synapses) between spines and neighboring nerve cells went down by 18%. The scientists suspect that this scale-back of neural connections during sleep is akin to pruning unneeded memories and associations in order to start fresh upon awaking.
Interestingly, not all spines shrunk equally. The larger spines were often spared while smaller, weaker ones were cut away. Stay tuned as the research unfolds.
Investigation by Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
#science #biology #research #nigms #scienceisbeautiful #nih #nihfunded #biomedical #microscopy #brain #neuroscience #synapse #sleep