PARADOXICAL REM SLEEP PROMOTING AND PERMITTING NEURONAL NETWORKS

摘要

Deemed to be discovered in the 1950's, the state of rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) was first identified and so-named for the occurrence of rapid eye movements during behavioral sleep in humans by Aserinsky and Kleitman (2). Subsequently identified by Dement (10) and by Jouvet (46) in cats, this state was called paradoxical sleep (PS) by Jouvet to capture its essence, being the apparent contradictory association of central activation, evidenced by rapid eye movements and fast cortical activity, with peripheral inactivation, evidenced by behavioral sleep and neck muscle atonia. Indeed despite the cortical activation, this state was found to be the deepest state of sleep in terms of the thresholds for sensory-motor reflexes, responses and arousal. Its paradoxical nature was further brandished by assigning it other contradictory names of "active sleep" for the rapid eye movements, muscular twitches, and cortical activation, on the one hand or "deep sleep" for the profound sensory-motor inhibition on the other. It was during this state that dreaming was reported to occur by Dement in humans (9) and evidenced to occur by Jouvet in cats (48). As the state of dreaming when mental images or behaviors are internally generated, REMS or PS may have first been described as a unique state in the 2nd millennium B.C. within the texts of the Upanishads dated back to that period (71). The challenge of the 2nd millennium A.D. has been the electrophysiological apprehension and comprehension of the neuronal networks that are involved in promoting and permitting this paradoxical state as will be reviewed in this chapter.