Andy’s Quick Hits (224): How Sleep Helps Your Brain Manage Fear

“Sleep on it” is common advice for many reasons. Often to consolidate thoughts and help boost creativity. This is a well-known effect. We also know that sleep is the time that helps to detoxify and grow the brain and body, and I have reported on some of these effects in different posts. But this latest research, from the University of Bern, here in Switzerland, supports another hypothesis of sleep — namely that it helps with your emotions.

That sleep, particularly REM sleep (REM sleep is the light sleep phases often associated with dreaming), helps consolidate emotions has been long known. But these researchers found out precisely how this happens in brain cells themselves and this is pretty cool, I have to say.

So, what did they find?

First off, these researchers conditioned mice to two signals. One a fear signal and second, a safety signal. These are the two obvious big emotions in terms of survival and something that is present in all species of animal. They were then able to precisely track these signals in the mice.

What they then found during sleep was astonishing. They found that there was decoupling within neurons to these signals. Specifically, the cell body seemed to be deactivated whereas the dendrites the connecting arms of the neurons activated and…