New findings support a controversial hypothesis about the biological role of sleep: Snoozing may be a way for the brain to clear clutter accumulated after a hard day of synapse forming and strengthening. Two __Science__ studies published today suggest that the brains of sleeping __Drosophila__ undergo an overall depression in synaptic strength and number, eliminating some minor neuronal connections while merely weakening stronger ones.
"Essentially you're reducing the signal to noise ratio," linkurl:Paul Shaw,;http://neuroscience.wustl.edu/research/faculty.php?id=150 a Washington University neurobiologist and lead author on one of the papers, told __The Scientist__. The hypothesis was first proposed about five years ago by linkurl:Chiara Cirelli;http://ntp.neuroscience.wisc.edu/faculty/cirelli.html and linkurl:Giulio Tononi,;http://ntp.neuroscience.wisc.edu/faculty/tononi.html neurobiologists based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and coauthors on the other __Science__ paper. (You can read more about their...
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sleep (left) and high after waking (right) in most regions of the fly brain Image courtesy of Chiara Cirelli |
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synapses in the brains of fruit fly's kept in a stimulus rich environment. The cells are highlighted on the upper right side of the image. Image courtesy of Washington University School of Medicine |
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