Your brain doesn’t rest during sleep!

Apparently, your brain does not rest even when you appear to be sleeping or resting. Instead, it carries out activities which are coordinated and complex, hence it requires so much energy.

“There is something that’s going on in a very structured manner during rest and during sleep,” says Stanford neurologist, Dr.Josef Parvizi, “and that will, of course, require energy consumption.”

Since several years, scientists had termed the brain’s electrical activity during rest or sleep as mere noises and did not matter very much. However, recent MRI tests revealed coordinated and intricate activities being carried out by the brain in regular patterns. So Dr.Parvizi and his team of researchers studied three people’s brain activities who were awaiting surgery for epilepsy. These patients had electrodes fitted into their brains so as to locate the source of their seizures. Parvizi was able to monitor the activity of small brain cells.

The first phase of the study included asking questions from

the patients as regards to simple things, such as whether or not they drove to work this morning. “In order to answer yes or no, you retrieve a lot of facts; you retrieve a lot of visualized memories,” Parvizi says. Activity was witnessed in two separate parts of the brain. These different regions of the brain worked together to produce the right answer.

Volunteers were afterwards asked to rest or even go to sleep, as Parvizi’s team continues to monitor their brain signals. “What we found,” he says, “was that the same nerve cells that were activated to retrieve memories … have a very coordinated pattern of noise.”

According to the doctor, brain regions may be working to cooperate in the future to answer similar questions or the same questions. Due to this fact, the brain is the most powerfully working part of the human body. This is due because it is always at work and performing functions.